European Security Culture

European Security Culture

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European Security Culture Language, Theory, Policy

Monica Gariup Zayed University, UAE

© Monica Gariup 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Monica Gariup has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gariup, Monica European security culture : language, theory, policy 1. European Security and Defence Policy 2. National security - European Union countries 3. Military policy 4. European Union countries - Military policy 5. Europe Defenses I. Title 327.1’16’094 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gariup, Monica. European security culture : language, theory, policy / by Monica Gariup. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7555-6 1. European Union countries--Foreign relations 2. National security--European Union countries. 3. Rhetoric--Political aspects--European Union countries. 4. European Union countries--Military policy. I. Title. JZ1570.A5G37 2008 355’.03304--dc22 2008031806 ISBN 978-0-7546-7555-6

Contents

List of Tables List of Figures Preface   Abbreviations   Acknowledgements  

vii ix xi xiii xv

1 Introduction  

1

PART I The Grammar of Security: Cultural Assumptions, Preferences, and Policies 2

The Framework of Analysis: Security, Grand Strategy, and Culture  19

3

Is Talk Really Cheap? Language as an Interface between Culture and Behavior   

4 Analyzing Security Discourses and Practices: A Typology  

47 69

PART II The Discourse and Practice of the Esdp: Between Auto-communication, and Power Projection 5 Contextualizing the Discourse on the European Security and Defence Policy or the Elements of the Activity-Performativity-Connectivity Dynamics   97 6

7

“A Secure Europe in a Better World”: Syntax and Semantics of the ESDP  

121

Grand Strategy in Practice: Testing Coherence between Discourse and Action  

187

8 Conclusion  

239

Bibliography   Index

245 331

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List of Tables

1.1 Central Themes of the Book and Literature Clusters   6 1.2 Levels of Analysis and Units   10 2.1 Paradigms in Security Studies 28 3.1 Components of Discursive Syntax and Grammar   54 3.2 Simplified Syntax of Security   58 4.1 Traditional and Human Security Discourses    83 4.2 Security and Defense: Traditional Bureaucratic Division of Labor   85 6.1 Analysis of Referent Objects Devised for Public Opinion Use (EB 54.1 2000)   136 6.2 Vital and Value Interests (based on Gnesotto 2004b:13)   137 6.3 Threats to European Interests (EOS Gallup Report 1996)   146 6.4 Threats (IPSOS 2001)   147 6.5 Threats in the Eurobarometer of Autumn 2002 (EB 58)    147 6.6 EU Priority Actions 2004 (EB 61)   157 6.7 Role of a European Army (EB 54.1 2000: 18)   157 6.8 Summary of the Syntactical Structure and Meaning of the EU Security Discourse   183 6.9 EU-ISS Taskforce Scenarios 2004   184 7.1 Synopsis of ESDP Missions (including aims and means)   226 7.2 Discourse-Action Coherence   229 7.3 Comparison between Grand StrategyAims (ESS) and Missions Aims 232

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List of Figures

1.1 Outline of the Book 2.1 The Disciplinary Relationship between IR and Security/Strategic Studies 3.1 The Reality-Action Path in Policy-Making   3.2 Securitization or Security Discourse as Strategic Resource for Action   6.1 The Geographical Reach of the ESDP in Discourse   7.1 The Institutional Organizational Chart (with 2004 constitutional changes)   7.2 ESDP Geographical Stretch as of March 2007  

14 26 63 67 174 196 231

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Preface

The core idea behind this study was initially conceived in the summer of 2000 when the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) was still in its “ad interim” phase, and when detractors would not bet on the future of what appeared to be a very fragile, ambiguous, and ill-fated experiment. Since then, a myriad of events have disrupted international life and, accordingly, the development of this research. The cataclysmatic changes induced by 9/11, the US-led war on terror, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Madrid and London bombings have prompted the European Union (EU) to quickly react and reflect on its position in a radically different international environment. In an amazingly fast pace, specialized institutions have been installed, missions have been deployed, and an ongoing discussion on the strategic requirements and implications of the EU’s role in the world has been kept alive through the production of forward-looking documents and guidelines. The release of the “European Security Strategy” (ESS) in June 2003, the results of the Convention on the Future of Europe, the 2004 Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC), the “Constitution for Europe”, the Lisbon Treaty, and the 2004 and 2007 enlargements represent the major landmarks of this incredibly quick progress. This state of affairs demands constant analytical attention to world events and begs the academic question of how research that tries to tackle very contemporary and highly politicized issues can survive the ambition of being “scientific” in any sense. Indeed, the greatest challenge encountered in the course of this endeavor has been one of control of the data set. Testifying for the importance of contextual environmental factors, events have triggered a constant re-assessment of the central hypotheses of this book, and they have been fuelling a condition of “insecurity” and anxiety, which a political researcher can hardly escape. Time is a very sensitive variable in this regard. One of the toughest decisions is to set a time limit for the intake of new empirical material in order to avoid the risk of being dangerously out-of-date or fatally disconfirmed. After an attentive observation of the magnitude of the developments in the field, the time frame for this research has been closed on September 2004, and thus covers a period of 5 years (since 1999). On the one hand, the EU enlargements and the ground-breaking approval of the “constitutional treaty” (despite the ratification hurdles haunting that text but also the following Lisbon Treaty rejected by the Irish referendum in June 2008), and on the other the investiture of a new Commission signalling a change in the leadership – the Italian President Romano Prodi has been substituted by Spanish Jose Manuel Barroso, British RELEX Commissioner Christopher Patten by Austrian Benita FerreroWaldner, while Javier Solana has remained as a symbol of continuity – have been interpreted as the signposts for the artificial conclusion of a phase. However, since

xii

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politics is in constant movement – and international politics even more so – this book should be considered as a preliminary exercise elucidating tendencies and theoretical underpinnings rather than establishing definite a-temporal and absolute results. The discussions presented in this work offer a comprehensive background to the ESDP and the issues at stake in view of the publication by Mr Solana of a review of the European Security Strategy by December 2008.

Abbreviations

ARRC Allied Rapid Reaction Corps CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy CHODs Chiefs of Defense CIMIC Civil Military Cooperation CIVCOM Committee for Civilian Aspects of Civilian Management CIVPOL Civilian Police CJTF Combined Joint Task Force CME Civil Military Exercise Conops Concept of Operation CONV European Convention CONST European Constitutional Treaty COREPER Permanent Representatives Committee CPN Conflict Prevention Network CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe DG Directorate General DRC Democratic Republic of Congo EADS European Aeronautic, Defence and Space Company EC European Community ECHO European Community Humanitarian Office ECMM European Community Monitoring Mission (in former Yu) ECSC European Coal and Steel Community EDC European Defense Community EIHR European Initiative for Human Rights EP European Parliament EPC European Political Cooperation EPF European Police Force ERRF European Rapid Reaction Force ERRM European Rapid Reaction Mechanism ESDC European Security and Defence College ESDI European Security and Defence Identity ESDP European Security and Defence Policy ESS European Security Strategy EU European Union EU-ISS European Union Institute of Security Studies EUMC European Union Military Committee EUMS European Union Military Staff EUMM European Union Monitoring Mission EUPM European Union Police Mission

xiv

European Security Culture

EUROFOR European (Rapid Deployment) Force EUROMARFOR European Maritime Force Europol European Police Office EU15 European Union 15 members as of 1995 EU25 European Union 25 members as of 1 May 2004 EU27 European Union 27 members as of 1 January 2007 GAC General Affairs Council HFC Helsinki Force Catalogue HR/SG High Representative/Secretary General (see also SG/HR) IGC Intergovernmental Conference IGO Intergovernmental Organization IPTF International Police Task Force (UN) ISAF International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan) JHA Judicial and Home Affairs NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NGO Non-governmental Organization NSS National Security Strategy OPLAN Operation Plan OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe PfP Partnership for Peace PKO Peacekeeping Operation PPEWU Policy Planning and Early Warning Unit PSC Political and Security Committee PSO Peace Support Operations QMV Qualified Majority Voting RELEX External Relations Directorate General RRF Rapid Reaction Force RRM Rapid Reaction Mechanism SEA Single European Act SG/HR Secretary General/High Representative (see also HR/SG) SHAPE Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers Europe (NATO) SITCEN Situation Centre TEU Treaty on European Union UN United Nations UNSC United Nations Security Council USA or US United States WEU Western European Union WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction

Acknowledgements Writing a book is often a very intensive and solitary endeavor. However, a number of institutions and people have supported me in these last years, and I am most grateful to all of them. In particular, I wish to thank the “Europa Fellows I” Program at Collegium Polonicum (Slubice, Poland) and the Europa Universität Viadrina of Frankfurt Oder (Germany), and Prof. Michael Minkenberg for his continuing support. As a rather “exotic” element in a predominantly German-Polish interdisciplinary group – both because of my passport and my training as an IR political scientist – I have been exposed to fruitful discussions and stimulating interactions with many colleagues and faculties working under the all-inclusive hat of the so-called “cultural sciences”. I am indebted to them for opening up to me a new universe of ideas, some of which I decided to explore more in depth and integrate into my research. Caught in the midst of very exciting but contradictory intellectual inputs and projects, I still managed to learn a lot from a variety of experiences and people. I would like to mention in particular Prof. Richard Betts (Columbia University Institute of War and Peace), who gave me the opportunity to participate at the Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy (SWAMOS 2002) at Cornell University. The intensive course and wonderful insights brought me back on track when I was lost in a fog of theoretical Pindaric flights. I am also indebted to the many commentators at several conferences and workshops where I presented my ideas and was challenged into very fertile debates. I always went home with precious suggestions and new perspectives. By the same token, I would like to thank those individuals in Brussels – both civilian and military – who sacrificed some of their time in order to provide me with important information and interesting points of view. Finally, I should not forget everybody who, especially in the final phase of this research, encouraged and convinced me not to despair and to give up. The friends at the European Public Law Centre (Athens, Greece) and the colleagues at Zayed University (Abu Dhabi, UAE) have offered me a shoulder in moments of desperation and disillusionment. Last but not least, my most sincere gratitude goes to my Italian and German families whose distant but incessant patience and tolerance contributed to remind me of my final goals, and to my husband whose continuing support and affection have proven invaluable.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

When I was talking about the European army, I was not joking. If you do not want to call it a European army, don’t call it a European army. You can call it ‘Margaret’, you can call it ‘Mary Ann’, and you can call it any name. (Prodi in The Independent, 4 February 2000). We have to move towards a more active and less declaratory foreign policy. Our words have to be matched by deeds. (Solana Nn01/99) We are trying to move from a foreign policy of communiqués and declarations full of strong nouns and weak verbs to something more substantive, more muscular, more focused, that can have more impact. (Patten SPEECH/02/134, SPEECH/02/76)

State of Affairs Security and defense have been critical – although rarely central – issues for the European Community (EC) before and for the European Union (EU) now. At the beginning of the European experiment in the 1950s security concerns counted among the primary considerations for integration. It was clear in the minds and consciousness of European elites that peace had to be cemented in a durable way and that, for what concerned the cocoon of the Western part of the old continent, the until-then-usual means of military supremacy and confrontation were not the solution to cope with the “anarchy” of interstate relations (Mitrany 1943; De Rougemont 1965). Nevertheless, the still warm memory of the disastrous Second World War, the division of the continent in two “enemy” blocs, and the need to reaffirm traditional forms of national power and sovereignty made it impossible to explicitly and successfully include security and defense on the agenda of the organization. The reference to the use and management of military force was exiled from the Community scope of responsibility and developed into a sort of taboo (Manners 2002a; Rummel 2002; Biscop 2002; etc.). The self-proclaimed normative identity of the EC/EU based on the values of peace, cooperation, multilateralism, and democracy led some analysts to define “the nature of the beast” in terms of “civilian” or “soft” power, whereby a positive connotation was evinced from the unfortunate – because incommensurable – analogy with the “evil” self-interested



European Security Culture

powers prone to use violence in order to enforce their will on the international or regional arena (Galtung 1973; Bull 1982; Whitman 1998; Rotfeld 2001). The development from Community to Union has not only been nominal or monetary. The often criticized neo-functionalist prophecies of spill-over from low politics to high politics appear to be in the advanced process of fulfilling themselves (or better to be fulfilled by the actors involved) and constitute l’ordre du jour in discussions about the political-constitutional future and the role of the EU in the world. The subject has cyclically caught the attention of policymakers throughout the history of European integration but has acquired particular resonance in connection with the international events of the last decade of the 21st century. The end of the Cold War and the re-discovery of old and new problems and threats have generated a debate concerning the availability, usefulness, efficacy and quality of the instruments the Community and the Union possess in dealing with external crises. The terms “security”, “defense”, and “military” have entered the discussions: the inability to efficiently cope with the situation in the Balkans and the realization of the need to re-conceptualize objectives and ambitions have contributed to the dissolution of the taboo. The invention of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has been welcome not only as a step forward towards further political integration but also as the sign that the taboo concerning the use of force seems to be finally overcome. The setting up of a European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF), with all the political, institutional, and bureaucratic implications that this new instrument entails is considered as the breaking point, the symptomatic indication of the final acceptance of the military in the EU-ropean forum. By 2008 a full institutional structure is in place with a force of the size of an army corps (50,000 to 60,000 troops) which has been deployed on the ground in a variety of formats in Macedonia, Bosnia and Congo among others. Despite internal disagreements among the Member States about a variety of foreign policy issues – first and foremost related to the war in Iraq and the U.S. government’s general approach to international relations – the Union managed to incorporate and expand the ESDP as a full component of the constitutional setup of the organization. Sensibly extending the range of the famous “Petersberg tasks” from traditional peacekeeping to a fully-fledged “peacemaking”, and opening the   Community and Union are not synonymous. The European Community has legal personality and is often identified with the competencies stemming from the so-called first pillar. The European Union should be the ‘temple’ comprising the Communities (Including ECSC and EURATOM), Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Judicial and Home Affairs (JHA).   There is an abundance of acronyms. Initially the ESDP was also known as Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP), and it should not be confused with the European Security and Defence Identity (a NATO initiative) or the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP).

Introduction



way to the possibility of a “mutual defense” clause among willing Member States, the controversial 2004 Constitutional Treaty and the successive Lisbon Treaty successfully brokered the integration of a military security dimension into the aims and means of the Union.

Questions and Aims What is the meaning of the terms “security” and “defense” in the same name European policy? Has the supposed taboo concerning military force really been broken or has it been reinterpreted because of a change in the identity or in the interests of the EU (or both)? What are the implications of rhetorical declarations for public policy and identity construction? This study attempts to enhance the understanding of the impact of ideas, norms, and values on the construction of security concepts in general and the EU security grand strategy in particular. The driving theoretical question is summarized by Ronnie Lipschutz in his book “On Security”: How do ideas about security develop, enter the realm of public policy debate and discourse and, eventually, become institutionalized in hardware, organizations, roles and practices? (Lipschutz 1995: 1).

Three different but interrelated levels and clusters of questions can be individuated at the basis of the current debate epitomized by Lipschutz’ query (see also Howorth 2004a): a. on the “philosophy of security”, or the source, importance, and weight of ideational variables (culture) in the construction of security issues (compared to the incidence of material determinants); b. on the “language of security”, or the role of language and discourse in the formulation of security concepts; and finally c. on the “politics of security”, or the impact of security discourses on institutionalization and action on the one hand and on identity and actorness on the other. This book has theoretical and empirical ambitions. The theoretical aim is, in the words of Barry Buzan, “to map the domain of security as an essentially contested concept (…) to define the conceptual sub-structures on which the mass of empirical studies by strategists and others rest” (Buzan 1997: 14) by providing a comprehensive framework of analysis against which the philosophy, language, and politics of the ESDP can be tested. Empirically this means to analyze the language of the ESDP in order to individuate a dominant logic and shed light on the cultural assumptions and the behavioral expectations which originate from rhetorical and policy formulations. In particular, the aim is to engage the debate



European Security Culture

on the nature of the EU as a security and strategic actor and to understand the dynamics of identity construction and self-conceptualization.

State of Research The literature on the ESDP is enormous but theoretically non-rigorous. The phenomenon is relatively recent and very young in terms of operational capacity and actual deployments. In addition, it is often downplayed for what concerns the width and depth of the overall policy aims and means or exploited as the banner of broader hidden political agendas of both scholars and policy-makers. As a matter of fact, much of the literature is purely descriptive, with a particular focus upon EU institutions and capabilities and factual policy-analysis. A number of works are dedicated to the repetitive narration of the historical developments of the ESDP and the successive institutional changes in declarations, decisions, and treaty implementations. Among other issues treated are also armaments and defense budgets, Member States’ attitudes and policies towards the ESDP, and technical operational details (Brenner 1998; Sjursen 1998; Croft 2000; Deighton 2000; Duke 2000; Giessman 2000; Groves 2000; Menon 2000; Stavidris 2001; Tanner 2001 Terriff 2001; Hunter 2002; Mueller 2002; Rynning 2002; Balis 2003; Gaertner 2003; Quille 2003; Sjursen 2003; Menon 2004; Peters 2004; Pilegaard 2004; Giegerich and Wallace 2004; Howorth 2007; Merlinger 2007b; Biscop and Andersson 2007; Engelbrecht and Hallenberg 2007; Giegerich 2007; and many others). Not surprisingly the EU is among the major producers – in the form of information sheets published on its website – and sponsors of this type of publications (Gambles 1991; Gnesotto 2000; Heisbourg 2000; Howorth 2000; Missiroli 2000; Missiroli 2001; Erhardt 2002; Lindley-French 2002; Faria 2004). A great deal of the literature is prescriptive or normative in nature and is centred around the debate over whether the EU should develop a security and defense dimension at all, and how it should develop it (what should the ESDP be like?) (Heisbourg 2000a; Naumann 2000; Guttman 2000; Biscop 2002; Howorth 2002; Becher 2004; Algieri and Bauer and Brummer 2005; Anderson and Seizt 2006). The policy-analytical approach is supplemented by discussions of visions, proposals, and implications not only for the development of the policy per se but also for the very character of the European Union as an actor or a power (Bretherton and Vogler 1999; Smith K. E. 2000; Stavidris 2001; Whitman 2002; Manners 2002; Hill 2003; Treacher 2004; Haine 2004; Hyde-Price 2006; Manners 2006; Sjursen 2006). The camp is generally divided into two broad factions: one cautioning against the development of an independent military capability because of the need to capitalize on “civilian power” strength (Rosecrance 1998; Smith 1998) or because of the need to cooperate with the United States and NATO (Glaser 1993; Greco 1996; Art 1996; Behnke 2000; Croft 2000; Kupchan 2000; Cornish and Edwards 2001; van Ham 2001; O’Sullivan 2001; Hunter 2002), while the other sees the ESDP as the litmus test of EU international actorness (Sjursen

Introduction



1998; Ginsberg 1999; Bertelsmann Foundation 2000; Ginsberg 2001; Cameron 2002) or even full-fledged federal integration (Hill 1993b; Koslowsky 1999; Von Bogdandy 1999). A smaller percentage of the literature provides a theoretical contribution to the study of EU external security (Waever 1995; Huysman 1996; Ginsberg 1999; Pollack 2000; Kelstrup/Williams 2000; Waever 2000; Geyer 2003; Sjursen 2004b; Hyde-Price 2006). Explanations of the ESDP are however in most cases included in liberal-institutionalist accounts where the EU member states are taken as central levels of analysis (Jakobsen 1997, 1998b; Regelsberger et al. 1997; Howorth 2001; Meyer 2004), or internal institutional mechanisms and their implications for the organization are analyzed at length (Van Staden 1994; Smith KE 1998; Andreani et al. 2000; Nuttal 2000; Win and Lord 2001; Smith ME 2003; Wagner 2003; Dietrichs and Jopp 2003). Exactly because of the continuing importance of traditional realist and liberal notions of state sovereignty – despite a number of attempts to challenge the orthodoxy (Caporaso 1995; King T. 1999; Cooper 2000; Smith ME 2003) – the EU is rarely taken seriously by mainstream International Relations (IR): it is underestimated or at a maximum considered as a case sui generis not useful in theoretical testing or development (Risse-Kappen 1996; but see Bronstone 2000 and Christiansen et al. 2000). In particular, security studies as a sub-discipline of IR only peripherically engage the theoretical challenges that the ESDP represents (Posen 2004), and strategic studies seem to be interested only in technical military accounts of a descriptive nature (Wolf and Zycher 2001; Andreani et al. 2001; McGinn and Liston 2001). An original effort to explain and conceptualize the ESDP by using existing theoretical paradigms and the idea of a strategic culture was however initiated by Cornish and Edwards 2001 and developed further by Howorth 2002, Rynning 2003, Martinsen 2003, Heiselberg 2003, Williams 2005, Meyer 2004 and 2007, and these in particular represent the background against which this book is set.

Theoretical Approach and Central Concepts Before engaging in an introduction to the theoretical approach adopted here, it is important to point out that this book is the result of a multi-/interdisciplinary and holistic approach. As a matter of fact, one of the fundamental objectives is to try to transgress the artificial compartmentalization between academic disciplines and to bridge the gap between Political Science, Sociology, International Relations, Security/Strategic Studies and European Integration Studies (with digressions into Linguistics, Anthropology, Philosophy and Psychology) by extrapolating and using “unorthodox” instruments in order to better understand security as a social condition on the one hand and as a political dynamic on the other. This is why this research can be situated in the context of the so-called “New European Security Theories” (NEST): a new generation of research moving among and across different schools of thought (Waever and Buzan 2007: 399).

European Security Culture



While efforts have certainly been made to theorize around aspects of the European security culture and policy, there are few systematic attempts to join together relevant theories and concepts. The background literature which inspired research and constitutes the backbone of this book can be classified according to its thematic central focus: The dominant approach is predicated on a number of general principles drawn from the theory of social action, and in particular, on tenets which can partially be reconducted to the meta-theory of social constructivism, since the security identity and interests of the EU are problematized (Jepperson et al. 1996: 67; McSweeney

Table 1.1 Themes Security

Culture

Central Themes of the Book and Literature Clusters Literature Critical security studies: Brown C. 1992; Krause and Williams 1997; Wyn Jones 1999; Weldes et al. 1999; CASE Collective 2006; and others; Copenhagen School and securitization: Buzan 1991; Waever 1995a, 1997 etc.; Buzan and Waever and DeWilde 1999; McSweeney 1999; and others Social constructivism: Kratochwil 1993; Katzenstein 1996; Finnemore 1996b; Ruggie 1998; Risse and Ropp and Sikkink 1999; Christiansen 2001; Hopf 2002; Zehfuss 2002 Strategic culture: Booth 1979, 1990; Gray 1984, 1999a, 1999b; Duffield 1998; Snyder 1990; Klein Y. 1991; Johnston 1995a, 1995b; Lantis 2002a, 2005; Poor 2003; Glenn 2004

Discourse

International Actorness

European strategic culture: Cornish and Edwards 2001, 2005; Heiselberg 2003; Rynning 2003a, 2003b; Hyde-Price 2004; Meyer 2004 and 2007; Williams 2005; Matlary 2006 Linguistics in general: Connolly 1983; Fairclough 1992; Potter 1996; van Dijk 1997a and 1997b; Barker and Galanski 2001 Discourse and foreign policy: Thornborrow 1993; Chilton 1996b; Dalby 1997; Donahue and Prosser 1997; Larsen 1997 and 2000b; Huysmans 1998; Waever 1998b and 2000a; Diez 1999 and 2001; Milliken 1999; Nicloaidis and Howse 2002; Schmidt and Radaelli 2004; Howorth 2004b; Howarth and Torfing 2005; Hansen 2006 European IR: Hill 1990, 1993a, 2003; Hill and Wallace 1996; Rosecrance 1998; Cameron 1998; Ginsberg 1999; Bretherton and Vogler 1999; Smith KE 2003; Treacher 2004 Powerness: Galtung 1973; Gastgeyer 1996; Guttman 2000; Lauren 2001; Rotfeld 2001; Manners 2002b, 2006; Hill 2003; Salmon and Shepherd 2003 Giegerich and Wallace 2004; Haine 2004b; Maull 2005; Caseey 2006; Aggestam 2008; Hyde-Price 2008; Bailes 2008

Introduction



1999) and ideational factors (such as intersubjective meanings, norms, discourse, and epistemic communities) are seen to concur in the perception and definition of security (Ruggie 1998: 33). In addition, this research can be situated in the strands of “constructive realism” (as opposed to “constructive idealism”) whereby the agent is deemed to have an epistemic but not an ontological influence on the existence of the world (Ben Zeev 1995: 50) and “organizational constructivism” according to which interests and identities are originated by consensual knowledge (Haas EB 2001: 26). It is assumed that international reality is not merely the result of material and physical forces, but that it is a phenomenon socially constructed through discursive power, that is, the power of knowledge, ideas, culture, ideology, and language (Adler 1997a; Hopf 1998). Fundamental to this thesis is also the claim that the concept of culture is critical to understand many of the important issues underlying security as a value and as a policy. The general focus of this book is roughly sketched in the phrasing of the title which retakes the words of Peter Katzenstein’s “The Culture of National Security” (1996). All three terms – taken singularly or collectively – are essentially problematic and are particularly tricky when associated to the European Union. “National security” refers to a clearly delimited state-centered condition, while “culture” awakens nightmares of never-ending intellectual discussions related to the definition and boundaries of identity: an anathema for students of mainstream international relations and strategic studies who are not supposed to leave the safe ground of “scientific” analysis and “high politics” and cede to the corruption of less positivist and popular methods of inquiry (Booth 1997). In order to be theoretically tenable, this approach requires a definition of culture that on the one hand is material enough to make it observable, while on the other is both dynamic and non-deterministic, so that it is possible to establish a methodological relationship between security cultural assumptions (strategic culture) on the one hand and policy preferences (grand strategy) and behavior (security policy) on the other. The instruments of language and discourse intervene in the relationship between structure and agency (Onuf 1989; Wendt 1992; Adler 1997b; Checkel 1998) and to solve the dilemma between culture as context and culture as behavior (Gray 1999; Johnston 1995a, 1995b). Using words as “thick signifiers” (Huysmans 1998b) and the concept of a dominant discourse as the constraining and enabling interface between ideas/culture/identity and policy/action/behavior, language is seen as a strategic resource for communication (or auto-communication) and the construction of identity and actorness (George 1994: 172–3; Buzan and Waever and de Wilde 1998; see also on communication: Diez 2001: 85; Habermas 1990). As a matter of fact, the analysis of discourse intended as a linguistic social product prompts on the one hand the drawing of inferences about the cultural assumptions existing at the input level and, on the other, the making of positive or negative predictions about the range of possible actions in terms of outputs and outcomes. A dominant discourse is indicative of dominant cultural assumptions – in this case, about security and the use of force – and it is constraining and enabling



European Security Culture

a particular set of policy options. Moreover, discourse and policy are interrelated in a dynamic and mutually constitutive process. If the actions are consistent with the dominant discursive “promises”, then the theoretical dilemma between culture as context or culture as behavior is solved in favor of the hypothesis that a circular relationship culture-behavior (via discourse) exists and that, for the sake of the analysis, it is possible to separate the two variables. By introducing discourse as an intervening variable and by bracketing the relationship culture-discourse, it is possible to complete the circle by looking at the relationship discourse-behavior (see Giddens 1994 and structuration theory). Simplifying, by syllogism, if culture (C) equals discourse (D) and discourse (D) equals behavior (B), then culture (C) equals behavior (B). The action made by the discourse (as a speech act) is one of delimiting, that is, setting boundaries to the meaning of the concepts implied. In this sense the discourse of the ESDP specifies the contours and scope of the policy by offering a context against which the terms should be interpreted. The question is not to assess whether the issues defined as threats to security are objectively dangerous for the referent object involved; rather, the aim is to highlight the components of intersubjective security: a social construct acquiring a precise meaning only within a specific social context and as a result of discourses and discursive actions (Doty 1996: 239). Finally, it should be stressed that the theoretical aim is not to demonstrate that a cultural explanation is superior to structural theories, but to highlight how cultural variables may complement the understanding of social phenomena in general and security in particular (Desch 1998). More than disaggregating the concept of culture as Meyer tries to do (2004), this research attempts to identify criteria to operationalize culture as a variable and transform it into a more “material” product (texts) that can be empirically studied. As a matter of fact, culture is merely used to support the neo-realist argument that by interacting in the international system, actors “will display characteristics common to competitors: namely, that they will imitate each other and become socialized to their system” (Waltz 1979: 128). This means in the EU case that the experience of the Union in international security will bounce back to influence the culture of the Union and the formation or consolidation of ambitions of statehood.

Level of Analysis and Empirical Assumptions The problem of the levels of analysis is directly connected to the choice and the relative weighting of explanatory variables. A clear-cut separation between the levels is not always the solution since the same variable can operate in a similar way on different levels (Jervis 1976). The internal/external dimensions and the dilemma concerning where to draw the lines between inside and outside constitute a central theme in the current debate about the future of security studies in particular and international relations in general, and considering the EU as the primary object of analysis does not facilitate the task. How far the Union is external to the

Introduction



member-states is a matter of perspective, whereby the traditional domestic/foreign dichotomy is being revised in all sectors of policy-making (see in particular the effects of globalization in Walker 1993; Sil and Dougherty 2000). In general, there are two ways to approach the security culture of the EU. On the one hand, one could consider the EU culture as the result of an addition of all the national strategic cultures. This presumes either convergence and/or uniformization: conflicting elements must be levelled and eliminated so that it is possible to identify a common strategy. In a bluntly simple algebraic equation, if you add different variables (x+y+n), you can obtain a result only if the terms of reference (measures) are the same, otherwise they have to be transformed (find a common denominator, calculated on the basis of a common variable – for instance x) in order to be summed. This process implies a “reduction”, a change in the perspective on how the elements are defined (see comparative approach: Heiselberg 2003; Meyer 2004 and 2005; Hyde-Price 2004; Merand 2006). On the other hand, the EU security culture can be considered as the product of a multiplication (see multiplier effect): the product is represented by the common position/policy/culture. Differences are not levelled (x*y*n), so that it is not possible to distinguish the inputs anymore. As shown in the Table 1.2, two different types of representations are possible: a traditional model whereby the EU is seen as an international organization; and a “federal” or unitary one (the ambition of the fore-fathers), according to which the European Union is considered as an entity in itself, as a product more than a sum. The most obvious criticism to this last approach is that the ESDP is an intergovernmental policy-area and that it is unsound to consider the Union as a unit in this field. However, as it will be argued, from an external point of view, the decisions and the operations on the ground, as well as the discourses about it, can be re-conducted in terms of legitimacy and responsibility to the Union as an entity as such, physically present through the symbol of the “starry-blue” flag. This is particularly true if one considers self-perception and discursive projections besides external recognition (Castano and Sacchi and Hayes Gries 2003). As a consequence, the border checkpoint is situated between the Union and the rest of the world. This means that, although in some cases inevitable, the policies of the individual member-states – the internal level – will not be problematized. More interesting in this context is the impact of the security construction on the development of a genuine overall EU-ropean identity (Delanty 1995; Whitman 1998; Morten 1999; Andrew and Crook and Waller 2000). In this sense, the external environment is populated by non-Member States (US, Russia, NATO and so on), member-states in their function as international actors (Germany, France, the United Kingdom…) and other governmental and non-governmental players; while the “domestic” level refers mainly to the EU institutions. For analytical simplification, the Union is considered as a proto-state: “literally” and functionally it possesses attributes which are comparable to characteristic federal-state features (Risse-Kappen 1996). This is in line with what has been called “methodological

European Security Culture

10

Table 1.2

Levels of Analysis and Units

Levels

Units – Traditional Model

Units – Federal Model

International

Other States and global IGOs, NGOS Council of Europe, NATO, NAFTA, ASEAN etc.

State Meso-Regional Micro-Regional

Other States and global IGOs (ex. UN), NGOS European Union, Council of Europe, NATO, NAFTA, ASEAN etc. Member States Sub-state regions Communities

Individuals

Citizens

Macro Regional

European Union Member States Sub-state Regions and communities Citizens

nationalism” or the fact that, independently from the theoretical color, the concept of state plays a pivotal role in studies of security (Beck 1997: 44). The analytical focus is thus on the particular construction of EU security as expressed in EU documents and speeches and in the associated discursive/ epistemic community. It is assumed that the EU security discourse has a relative autonomy and does influence the sub and supra level (Member States and the international level) (see for instance neo-institutionalism March and Olsen 1989).

Methodology One of the ambitions of this book is not only to contribute to better understanding the security narrative and identity of the European Union, but to develop a model for the analysis of security discourses in general and advance general knowledge of complex social and political phenomena. Critics may question the use of only one case-study in theory testing. In particular, within the positivist approach to science, single case-studies are seen as problematic because they do not provide sufficient bases for generalizations. However, this method allows the researcher to study a phenomenon intensively, interpret how theoretical elements are related to each other, and thereby arrive at a better understanding of complex problems and dynamic processes (Yin 1984: 23). It offers an illustration that gives a provisional indication of the relevance of the analytical framework proposed. In this sense, the analysis of the ESDP is not only useful for the policy implications that might derive, but it enhances the comprehension of the logic of the security dynamic in general. The EU discourse of security is here intended as the totality of texts (spoken or written) produced by the EU as an institution (or by its representatives), which reflect and reproduce a determined approach to security and where the EU speaks

Introduction

11

with a unique voice in the period 1998–2004. Different types of texts belong to this discourse, among others, the statements, declarations, speeches, lectures, and articles of CFSP/ESDP High Representative Solana, Commission President Prodi, and RELEX Commissioner’s Patten. Moreover, legislative instruments like treaties, common strategies, and joint actions enshrine the dominant discourse and are to be considered already part of the action. As a matter of facts, these texts are the final result of long diplomatic negotiations between Member States (with different historical, political, or social backgrounds), and they reflect the achieved consensus (for good or for worse). A central role is played by the European Security Strategy (ESS) as the point of arrival of a relatively long internal debate. However, this key document is in no way considered as the only text of reference since, as Milliken points out, “if the analysis is to be about social signification, a discourse analysis should be based upon a set of texts by different people presumed (…) to be authorized speakers/writers of a dominant discourse” (Milliken 1999: 233). It should be noted that the aim is not to analyze the personal worldviews of the individuals, but to highlight the “official” problem representations that result from the policymaking process. In addition, 32 off-the-record interviews conducted with EU officials, foreign ministry officials and diplomats, military personnel seconded to the EU, academic specialists and journalists in Brussels, Berlin, London, Rome, and Paris provide important qualitative inputs for the interpretation of the above-mentioned texts. The concept of EU-ropean security and defense can thus be constructed through the analysis of the discourse of the EU as a formal organization (the statements and declarations of its organs) and as expressed in informal communities of political decision-makers and military officers (see also Burgess and Tunander 2000). The use of primary resources – documentary evidence and interviews – however, is severely hindered by the regime of confidentiality which limits the public access to the decisions or reports related to the most sensitive issues connected to the ESDP. This lack of transparency is partially compensated by the recourse to secondary literature and, specifically, to the knowledge of the security epistemic community. For reasons which are explained at length in Chapter 5, the use of opinion polls or other statistical sources is very limited and referred to only as a tertiary tool for supporting evidence. A note on the language is important. The common technical jargon is the diplomatic language informed by “statal” notions and symbols which constitute the basic terms of reference and facilitate communication and common understanding of the terms used, independently of the particular language spoken. However, English, and at a lower degree French and German, is the language used in the business of CFSP and ESDP, that is, for communication to the external world, (what is obviously normal since the major receivers are located outside the Union).  ������������������������������������������������������������������������ See art. 4(1), Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents (Official Journal L 145/43 of 31.05.2001).

12

European Security Culture

Although official declarations and statements as well as legislative documents are published in the pre-2004 11 official languages, the speeches – inside and outside the Union – are generally performed in English. The local language of the venue is used only in the case the speaker can speak it, and in any case, the personal rhetorical attributes of the speaker play quite an important role. The fact that the final texts are often the product of ghost-writers and/or team-work fortifies the hypothesis of a common linguistic system. Most interestingly, the websites of the CFSP High Representative as well as of the External Relations’ Commissioner are only in English, while for instance other websites of the Commission can be found in all the official languages. The use of English as a lingua franca is important because, as it will be discussed later, the speaking of a particular language may entail important conceptual differences in the respective political culture (Chilton 1996a: 29). The problem of understanding and meaning between mother-tongues and second language speakers as well as the differences among cultural contexts are in a way overcome by the assumption of the existence of an epistemic discursive community sharing and understanding a standard technical jargon. In the case of translations, apart from the fact that in general official translations are carefully drafted and must be finally approved for release, original texts in French, German, Italian and Spanish are compared for consistency with the official English version. The working assumption, confirmed in the analysis of the empirical material, is that there is a common language (the political-diplomatic jargon) across institutions (Council, Commission, and EP) and across sectors or pillars. For what concerns the method for the analysis of the actual texts and of the discourse in general, two observations are relevant here. In general, discourse analysis includes a variety of methods ranging from pure structural linguistics to semantics and pragmatics. One of the aims of this book is however to contribute to the development of empirical methods to study security discourses. After a selection of most important texts in terms of legitimacy and authority (legislative or official source), topic, and resonance in the public, texts are analyzed on the basis of a syntactical model. In particular, at the macro-level texts are contextualized, while at the micro level the elements of the texts are classified on the basis of the function played in the sentence. Inescapably, the researcher plays a determinant role in the selection and interpretation of the texts to analyze. From a quantitative content analysis perspective at the micro level, the frequency in which certain words and formulations appear in the texts is assessed and then evaluated according to the model (Jaworski and Coupland 1999: 36–38). Since the aim is to highlight the common logic behind the dominant discourse, the analysis is synchronic, that is, materials from different contexts, actors, and years are fitted into a “syntactical structure” like fragments fitted together in a puzzle, so that it is possible to individuate recurrent patterns, structural arrangements, and chains  �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Interestingly, in particular in the Commission, the ghost-writers in this field were until 2004 all English mother-tongues.

Introduction

13

of equivalence (Skinner 2002). The time of production is relatively unimportant in this research because it is assumed that displayed beliefs tend to be consistent across the period of analysis: in fact, even an event of the proportions of 9/11 did not essentially change the dominant pre-existing assumptions and vocabulary, thus testifying for relative stability of focal concepts. In practice this means that texts are initially filtered through the use of boundary markers and Boolean combinations. In particular, the following key-words have been used: ESDP, security, defense, threat, challenge, danger, risk, military, force, civilian, war, peace, strategy, values, interests, global, territory, human, conflict, crisis. As it will be discussed more in length in the following, these terms are considered to be “classifier languages” of security or nouns which reveal the structure of conceptual categories (Lakoff 1987: 92). It is important to stress that discourse analysis works on public texts, and it does not try to get to the thoughts or motives of the actors. The weakness of linking discourse to culture lies however in the fact that it is not possible to assess whether the texts do really represent ingrained meanings or beliefs, since they can be manipulated for rhetorical reasons. In order to avoid the complexity of referring to psychological and cognitive approaches, the dominant discourse is considered as a structure produced by social interactions that create public beliefs. At the same time, bias in the speeches and statements is controlled through cross-tabulation with writings intended for a variety of different audiences, triangulation of public sources, and confidential interviewing (see also Berger 1996).

Outline Since the main contribution of this study is the elaboration of a theoretical analytical model, the structure follows a deductive logic proceeding from the general to the particular, from the theory to the practice. Chapter 1 has introduced in brief the rationale, the aims, the research problematique, and the arguments that will be touched upon in the development of this work. The rest of the book is sub-divided in two parts of three chapters each. Figure 1.1 summarizes the organization of the narrative. Chapter 2 introduces the framework of analysis and discusses the basic analytical tools of this research (the philosophy of security). It traces the main lines of discussion in Strategic/Security Studies and International Relations Theory and assesses the validity of new approaches to the subject of international security. In particular, it establishes the relationship between culture (political and strategic) and grand strategy (policy preferences). Chapter 3 is dedicated to the presentation of the role of language and discourse in the construction of a security concept (the language and politics of security). Discourse is intended as both structure and behavior but the two conceptions are kept separated: on the one hand the elaboration of a discursive syntax is introduced as a model for the analysis of security (micro and macro), and on the

European Security Culture

14

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Introduction

15

other discourse is positioned as an interface between culture and action (beliefslanguage-action) in an attempt to answer the question of how ideational variables can be empirically tested in the analysis of the policy making process and of agenda setting in particular. On the basis of the ongoing debate and applying the analytical framework developed in the previous chapter, Chapter 4 proposes an ideal-typology of security discourses: the “Westphalian traditional security” discourse and the “Human Security” discourse. An overview of the terms of reference for current discourses and practices of security (including defense and crisis-management) sets the backstage for the comparative analysis of the ESDP. The second part is dedicated to the EU case study and the application of the model to the EU security discourse and practice. The objective of Chapter 5 is to discuss the situational, cultural, cognitive, and co-textual contexts of the discourse in order to then locate in Chapter 6 the grammar of EU security through the analysis of texts on the basis of the syntax constructed (subject, referent object, predicate, and prepositional phrases). The grammar used suggests the dominance of a “traditional-plus” security discourse in line with the majority of contemporary Western security grand strategies. In addition, particular attention is devoted to the self-referential construction and projection of the Union as a power. Finally, Chapter 7 turns to the practice of EU security in terms of policy outputs (institutions) and behavioural outcomes (missions): the aim is to establish a relationship between the preferences expressed in the discourse and policy action, and to test the coherence between the two variables. In conclusion, Chapter 8 assesses the relevance of the model for the study of the ESDP, discusses limitations, and suggests avenues for further research.

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PART I The Grammar of Security: Cultural Assumptions, Preferences, and Policies

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Chapter 2

The Framework of Analysis: Security, Grand Strategy, and Culture

What is security? Where is it coming from? Is there a relationship between security and the use of military force? The aim of this chapter is to introduce and discuss the key concepts and causal relationships building the analytical framework of this book. Most importantly, three central questions are considered: a) what are the determinants of security as a concept?; b) what are the determinants of security as a policy or practice?; and finally c) what is the relationship between concept and policy (or what is the mechanism behind the translation of an idea/assumption into action/behavior?). After a review of the various meanings of security and of the associated disciplinary and theoretical approaches, it will be argued that culture affects grand strategy, although security outputs and outcomes (practice) might not necessarily reflect the cultural input.

What is Security? Concept, System, and Theoretical Battleground Security as a Concept “Security” is one of the most recurrent and fashionable, albeit highly contested and ambiguous concepts in International Relations (IR). This is not surprising since the majority if not all of the fundamental notions developed and/or used by the social sciences in general and by political science in particular – like power and freedom for instance – are ephemeral and opaque: they often lack “agreed” elements, basic definitions, and simple mechanisms and relations that are convincing enough to elicit universal acceptance and support (De Jouvenel 2000: xvi). Before entering the specific discussion of the various “meanings” which may be attributed to security as a theoretical concept, it is important here to digress first and foremost on the function of a “concept” in the theory of knowledge in order to highlight the role of “ideas” in many of the academic debates on security. In scientific enquiries, concepts, principles, theories and laws together with a variety of scientific processes and values constitute the preliminary assumptions about reality that are used to construct new explanations concerning objects and events. The assumptions presuppose an underlying order (natural or artificial) whereby a concept is a “basic unit of thinking” that controls and makes understanding possible (Sartori 1994: 27).����������������������������� ���������������������������� But what is a concept? What does the term mean and suggest? In academic and everyday usage there is a clear

20

European Security Culture

inflation in the use of the word. Everything can be “conceptualized”, what implies that the object of reference is elevated to a somewhat higher level of intellectual importance. This often means as well that the object is enveloped in an aura of vagueness and ambiguity. Democracy in state X does not necessarily correspond to the general and philosophical concept of democracy: the concept enshrines a priori conventional characteristics and qualities that make the idea of democracy immortal and universal. Security as a material phenomenon might indicate the individual status of being safe from the danger of physical harm or pain, while the concept of security goes beyond the contingency of the single situation and entails a variety of cognitive elements that can be hardly separated and independently pinpointed as concrete facts. In this sense a concept is an abstraction, an idea, a construct intended as a sum or a complex of interrelated and intersubjective meanings. It is a box, a container of categories that are bound together by precise links and elaborated and negotiated through social interaction (Sartori 1994: 49; Chilton 1996a: 50). As a matter of fact, “conceptualization” refers to the articulation of thoughts, ideas, or hunches and the representation of these in some objective, internally coherent and consistent form; while “conception” pertains to the interpretation and application of the core concept and its meaning clusters (references and properties) (Flathman 1973; Collier and Brady 2000).  Such a description implies several epistemological claims: a. that a concept is a product, an artifact manufactured consciously or unconsciously for the sake of regrouping complex categories and simplifying reality, and it is thus central to knowledge; b. that it involves an action, the organization of contents and the definition of the direction of the relationship between singular components; c. that its “mapping” and formation are dependent on the existence of actors and their interaction; and finally d. that a concept is not immobile, but that it is constantly renegotiated through the interplay of actors, observers, reality and other concepts. As Stefano Guzzini points out in his article on power, the problem with treating concepts as variables for the scope of rigorous scientific reasoning is that their content has to be severely fixed and “mathematized” so that most scholars, aware of the difficulties to pin down a concept, prefer to concentrate on elements easier to manipulate, thereby risking to neglect the most significant aspects of the concept (Guzzini 2002: 5). For the sake of investigation then, concepts-variables are often subsumed and taken for granted, although it is recognized that their actual meaning is ambiguous and controversial. Concept analysis comes then to help and plays the function of facilitating communication and understanding by supplying an array of answers concerning concept formation and its internal mapping. Approaches vary and depend on the level of analysis: at the micro/internal level concepts are linguistically considered as a means of explanation and sentences are built as mathematical formulas (what the concept means); at the macro level concepts

The Framework of Analysis: Security, Grand Strategy, and Culture

21

are analyzed as constitutive elements of particular theories and contexts, and the focus is centered on their functions (what the concept does). The medium level is constituted by conceptual history whereby linguistic pragmatics and sociology come together in order to identify the nature and reasons of crystallization and stability or change and transformation in meaning over time (Guzzini 2002: 3). Although the reference to Gallie’s seminal work on “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie 1962) seems to be one of the few undisputed allegations in the huge literature on security of the last two decades, no scholars – as Jef Huysman claims – have ventured in a comprehensive analysis of security using all the three levels identified above in order to try to delve enough into the question concerning the “real” meaning of security (Huysmans 1998: 227). Huysman goes further and suggests that security should be interpreted as a “thick signifier” which “brings us to an understanding of how the category ‘security’ articulates a particular way of organizing forms of life” (Huysman 1998b: 231). The problem is heightened by the fact that understanding and explaining are often considered as synonymous, and that the role of interpretation is often overlooked (Hirschman 1970; Hollis and Smith 1990). Given this background, it is not surprising that there still is “no common understanding of what security is, how it can be conceptualized, and what its most relevant research questions are” (Haftendorn 1991: 5): it is exactly because the concept of security does not float freely “out there”; it is a product of the interpretation or manipulation done by researchers and practitioners. The dilemma is thus whether it is possible to objectively identify the components of the concept paying tribute to the ambition of maintaining neutrality/universality without falling into the trap of value-dependency inherent in concept analysis (Lakoff 1987: 302; Weldes 1996). As it will be discussed more in detail in Chapter 4, it is here argued that a unique and uncontested concept of security is illusory because it is subjected to different interpretations depending on the perceptions of the viewer (Wolfers 1962: 147). Security as a System The Oxford English Dictionary defines security primarily as: “the condition of being protected from or not exposed to danger; safety (…) freedom from care, anxiety or apprehension; a feeling of safety or freedom from or absence of danger” (The Oxford English Dictionary 1987: 853–4; Rothschild 1995: 61). Apart from a very neutral description which refers to the classical Latin term securitas, the authors of the dictionary intermingle in the definition “the safeguarding or safeguarding of (the interests of) the state against danger”, whereby a specific use of the word in the political context of the state system is suggested. The aim of this paragraph is however to try to reproduce the basic constitutive elements of the concept of security and to delimitate its borders of order by de-contextualizing and extrapolating them from the specific connotations attributed in discourses of politics and International Relations.

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The system approach allows for the identification of the elements or components which should organically come together to form a coherent entity. The components of the security system encompass a referent object and a threat, and they are linked together in a relational network which may account for the concept’s ambiguity. Security is both a technical term and a word of common usage. General images connected with security hint to immobilization, stability, and balance (“to be secured to the ground” for instance). In the financial world, securities are bonds, a commodity. The presupposition here is that security is measurable and thus divisible and quantifiable (Chilton 1996a: 60–62). It should be noted that these formulations refer to “existential” security intended as the survival of a referent object rather than to “ontological” security as “the confidence that the natural world is as it appears to be” (Manners 2002a: 12). This distinction is important because the common use of the term of security in IR is generally related to existence rather than ontology. Arnold Wolfers, in an article from 1952 entitled “National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol” identified threats and values as essential components of the security system: “Security, in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values will be attacked” (Wolfers 1962: 150). He went on to define security in negative terms: “security after all is nothing but the absence of the evil of insecurity, a negative value so to speak” (Wolfers 1962: 151). Another way is to approach it from a positive point of view: a narrow perspective sees security as the ability to deal with a specific threat by somehow neutralizing it, while a broader one refers to relative freedoms from constraints or in other words various kinds of dangers and risks. Wolfers’ definition is important because it highlights the fact that there is a cognitive and psychological dimension inherent in a security system. Security is thus an attitude of mind, which depends heavily upon the perceived nature of the environment one is in (Salmon 1996). Perceptions are influenced by cognition or how people perceive data: “My perceptions of the dark streets I pass walking home from the movies will be different if the film I saw had dealt with spies than if it had been a comedy” (Jervis 1970: 250). This state of affairs represents a problem for the unambiguous definition of both the values to be secured or referent objects and the threats to those very values. In addition, since threats are by definition of a hypothetical nature, they are not directly measurable but based on estimates and the assumed probability of highly undesirable potential eventualities (Rousseau et al. 2000). In order to escape this conundrum, Lodgaard suggests to exclude threats from the definition of what constitutes security, thus eliminating a potential source of dissent (Lodgaard 2000: 10). He however does not explain how it is then possible to understand security without using the concept of threat. As a matter of fact, the problem of measuring perception and hypothetical events is often positively solved by translating these aleatory variables into estimation or a security equation expressed in mathematical terms which take into consideration probability calculations: “Threat perception = Estimated Capability x Estimated Intent” (David Singer quoted in Salmon 1996: 10).

The Framework of Analysis: Security, Grand Strategy, and Culture

23

It should be noted that in a security system, different degrees of threats are usually individuated. These degrees are expressed with the use of specific vocabulary like “risk”, “danger”, and “vulnerability”. The use of these other terms obviously further complicates the understanding of not only what security is, but also of what security should do. While a threat is usually considered to be “identifiable, often immediate”, and requiring “an understandable response”, a vulnerability is deemed to be “an indicator, often not clearly identifiable, often linked to a complex interdependence among related issues, and does not always suggest a correct or even adequate response” (Liotta 2005: 51). Another way to look at the definition of the source of insecurity is to look at the subject of insecurity or the responsibility of action: for Daase, threats and risks are insecurity caused by the decision of an actor, the difference being that in the case of threats the actor is clearly identifiable while behind risks there are unidentifiable agents; dangers on the other hand are out there and do not stem by human decisions (Daase 2002: 12). The accent on threats and risks in the social scientific definition of security is thus explained by the fact that human action is the cause. But how are risks determined if they cannot be conduced to a clear source? Actually risk avoidance and management is a business sector: risk is there calculated as [Threat (T) x Vulnerability (V)] x Consequence (C), whereby threat is a measure of the likelihood that a specific type of attack will be initiated against a specific target (a scenario); vulnerability is a measure of the likelihood that various types of safeguards against a scenario will fail; and consequence is the magnitude of the negative effects if the attack is successful (ABS Consulting n.d). The issue of the responsibility of the source of the threat complicates the task of delimiting what security is (a passive, state-of-the-art definition), because it introduces the component of activity, thus transforming a condition into a dynamic action (what makes security/insecurity). Lipschutz maintains that “’[s]ecurity’ as it is practiced can be understood (…) as a product of empirical factors, perceptions, and social constructions” (Lipschutz 1995:5). However, as it will be shown, the concept rather than the practice of security is determined by the interplay of these variables. The confusion between concept and practice is coupled with confusion between determinants and components. As a matter of fact, security may be aggregate or disaggregate depending on the size and complexity of the unit of reference; or even instrumental as the means to achieve something else, or normative as the aim in itself (to secure security). In addition, a plethora of descriptors (adjectives and qualifications) are usually added to the basic concept of security like for instance national or international, internal or external, hard or soft, economic, cultural, environmental, ethnic, political, psychological, ontotheological, social, societal, human security etc.: the problem is that it is unclear whether these specifications indicate dimensions of the same referent object or whether they are separate and clearly distinguishable categories responding to different systems of object-threat interaction (Liotta 2002).

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Finally, the fundamental system of security is formed by the interrelationship between referent objects and threats (whether subjective or objective) bound together by an action-reaction mechanism. The definition of the nature and identity of these objects and threats, as well as the qualification of the actions required to break this system, depend on the identity of the subject who perceives or observes insecurity (Lipschutz 1995; Baldwin 1997; Bajpai 2000). It should be noted that the two positions of “observer” and “perceiver” are not necessarily coincidental, and this dissonance may explain why there are a number of concurrent definitions and explanations. Security as a Theoretical Battleground Because of the ambiguity of the components discussed above and in particular the co-existence of objective and subjective elements in the definition of a security system, theoretical debates about the meaning of security (ontology) and the way to study it (epistemology) have been the source of an abysmal amount of paper, which indicates that the field is in a state of flux. A review of the state of research and of the major approaches developed in the discipline of International Relations should reveal the extent of the discord in the academic community. The impact of these theoretical discussions on security discourse and policy will be assessed in Chapter 4. It is however important here to delineate the different conceptualizations of security to start introducing the borders of orders of ensuing discourses and practices. Wolfers, cited above, discussing the problem of individuating the meaning of security, did not only spell out the subjective component of security but went so far to argue that the concept “could even be devoid of exact meaning” (Wolfers 1962: 165). Similarly, Buzan stressed that the ideological aspect entailed in the concept cannot be verified or falsified by empiricism (Buzan 1991: 7), while Der Derian speaks of an “ontotheology of security” as an “a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread metaphysical belief in it” (Der Derian 1995: 25). This trend tends to problematize what was practically considered as axiomatic in mainstream IR: security as exogenously determined and an integral part of the structure of international relations and the model of state power. The “underdevelopment” of the concept claimed by Buzan in 1991 is passé (Buzan 1991: 7–10): since then both IR and its subdisciplines of security and strategic studies have come to grip with foundational questions and their implications for praxis, so that the “symbolic ambiguity” said to be useful to the practitioners of national policy to cover-up power games has been laid bare. It should be stressed that the debate about security is not however isolated from a wider theoretical discussion on the crucial terms in the conceptual repertoire of the discipline, and that it is part of a network of other key notions and political concepts which are also inherently problematic (Oppenheim 1981: 10).

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As discussed above about concepts in general, paradigms and analytical perspectives – like ideology – affect the “questions one asks about the word, the type of information and evidence sought, the type of answer that emerges and – perhaps most crucially – the explanation with which one conclude” (Salmon 1996: 9). This means that theory choices and their underlying conceptual assumptions play a pivotal role for the outcomes of research, and that as a consequence, there can be many “truths”, depending on the concept definitions and theoretical approach used (Ojanen 1998: 346). Unlike photographic pictures of reality, but more like a painted portrait where the author’s interpretation plays a central role (Morgenthau 1960: 6–7), theories are not only instrumental for the specific purpose of individuals, but their perspectives come from a position in social, material, and political time and space (Cox 1986: 206; Acharya 2000), so that it is possible to describe the meso-level or the historical development of a concept, and draw inferences about the circumstances which prompted its particular characterization. Most importantly, theories do not only define explanatory possibilities, but they also enable or constrain the ethical and practical boundaries of human action (Smith S. 1996), and from a mere academic exercise they become intertwined with the interests of the policy-community. This connection between theory and practice is particularly evident in the field of security, because practitioners often look up at academia for justifications of action, while the academia finds prestige and financial support in the policy arena. Testifying for this link with political practice, International Relations as an academic discipline with an institutionalized professional infrastructure was born as a sub-discipline of political science after WW1, with the declared aim of studying ways to prevent another war conflict. Despite an alleged American hegemony (Smith S. 1993; Waever 1998a; Jorgensen 2000), the discipline has been constantly redefining and reconfirming itself through a series of grand debates and the emergence of different paradigms on both sides of the Atlantic: a) realism vs. idealism; b) traditionalism vs. behavioralism (or structure vs. actors); and c) positivism vs. post-positivism (Lijphart 1974; Wendt 1987; Lapid 1989; Carlsnaes 1992; Ashworth 2002). Objects of these debates are not only the definition of politics per se, but also the role of conflict (Krause and Williams 1997), power and the “allocation of values for a society” (Salmon 1996: 2), the relationship between war and peace, and the definition of the borders of order in the domesticforeign, inclusion-exclusion, internal-external, self-other, inside-outside, identitydifference, particular-universal dichotomies (or the Schmittian friends/enemies in Schmitt C. 1985). The level of analysis and the centrality of the unit of the state is often matter of contestation (Waltz 1959). Of relevance in this discussion is in particular the so-called “cultural turn” in the social sciences, and as a corollary, in IR. The dominant schools of neorealism and liberalism have found themselves attacked from different directions, suffering internal coups and external aggressions. More so in the field of security studies where for decades strategic issues – concerning the use of military power – played a hegemonic role in the definition and orientation of the discipline. The

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hibernation mode set up during the Cold War and represented by a predilection for rationalism, scientific objectivism, and hard facts has been shattered by a horde of critical and “constructivist” dissenters, who doubt the validity and relevance of focusing predominantly on material economic and military capabilities and on “bean-counting” procedures. Under fire are epistemological as well as ontological assumptions about the nature of the international system, causal variables, and research methodologies. It is not surprising thus that traditional “strategic studies” once considered as the predilected house where to study security have been subjected to a gradual “IR-ification” (Waever and Buzan 2007: 390), through which the focus on military issues and the disinterest for theoretical development (Betts 1997) have been complemented by a broader and more “political” disciplinary context for theorizing, and have been enlarged through the cross-pollination with other social sciences like sociology and anthropology (Wyn Jones 1999: 127). The table below shows the relationship between the various sub-disciplines: Strategic Studies is here pictured as a sub-sub-discipline of the sub-discipline International Relations (Collins 2007), while for most of the Cold War Security Studies have suffered of a complex of inferiority, because of the importance given by policymakers to matters of military capabilities and balance of power. In order for Security Studies to regain self-confidence, its main exponents have been engaging in a series of semantical exercises aimed at re-conceptualizing what until then was taken for granted by widening, broadening, and deepening the understanding of what security is, and by expanding the array of alternative methodological positions. Indeed, movement characterizes different “new” paradigms in security studies which engage in: a) horizontally broadening the dimensions of security beyond the military to include economic, environmental and

3ROLWLFDO6FLHQFH ,QWHUQDWLRQDO5HODWLRQV 6HFXULW\6WXGLHV 6WUDWHJLF6WXGLHV

Figure 2.1

The Disciplinary Relationship between IR and Security/Strategic Studies

The Framework of Analysis: Security, Grand Strategy, and Culture

27

societal issues; b) vertically deepening the security agenda by enlarging the units of reference to include the individual, the regional or the global levels of analysis moving away from the state as unique referent and subject (Buzan et al. 1998: 5–6; Krause and Williams 1995); c) thickening by enriching the methodology of analysis and transforming security “from definition to concept to thick signifier” (Huysmans 1998b: 229); and finally d) vectoring security by indicating the relative position of power of the actors in the construction of security as a concept and as a practice (Manners 2002a: 9). This mushrooming of approaches and paradigms, criticized by some as causing a growing discrepancy between theory and practice (Brown N. 1992: 5), is however nothing new: the fact that events are the triggers of theorizing explains the seasonality of security thinking and principles (Rothschild 1995: 52–54). Indeed, Baldwin (1995), Krause and Williams (1996), McSweeney (1999), Arnold and Beier (2000), and many other scholars after them, have tried to categorize different dominant waves in security studies and to construct a narrative history of the sub-discipline. For example McSweeney identifies four dominant periods in the history of security studies: political theory, political science, political economy and sociology, each of them associated to a particular prevailing epistemological and ontological approach (McSweeney 1999: 28–31). Independently from judgments about whether this categorization is accurate or not, what is important in this context is the fluidity of the turns and returns of keywords in a circular rather than linear manner. The contemporary debate about the levels of analysis, the dimensions, and the depth which should be considered in security studies is thus nothing else than a return to the early stages of the discussions about the nature, source, meaning and scope of power in political science. Although dominance is not necessarily historically determined but more dependent on specific geographical and cultural interest-groups (Booth 1979; Acharya 2000), the categorization of different approaches is useful to understand when and how certain terminology and its theoretical underpinnings are appropriated by the policy-makers (see idealtypical discourses in Chapter 4). In order to facilitate comparison, sub-currents are excluded from the analysis. Dominance is intended in terms of academic products, consulting power, and financing received. The Political Theory approach (associated by McSweeney 1999: 31–32 to the period 1918–1955) is characterized by a consideration of security as multidisciplinary and multi-dimensional, with a particular focus on political and psychological aspects, whereby military force tends to be neglected exactly because politics is viewed as a unique and integral field of study populated by different variables with equal weight (Baldwin 1995: 120). Security is thus only one of several values to be considered along with economic interests, ideas, and culture for instance. Wolfers (1962) and Morgenthau (1960, 1966) are among the major representatives of this approach. With a non-extremist rationalist epistemology allowing for limited intersubjectivity, this approach is paradigmatically associated with classical realism, which stresses the importance of the state as the unique actor in an anarchical, hostile, and “self-help” international environment and of

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Table 2.1

Paradigms in Security Studies

Disciplinary focus

Traditionalists Political Theory

Political Science

Innovators Political Economy

Paradigms

Realism

Self-Labelling

National Strategic Security Studies Studies

Liberalism, Copenhagen School, Social Constructivism International Security studies

Epistemology

Objective Positivist

Objective Positivist

Neo-Realism

Objective Positivist

Sociology

Postmodernism, Critical Theory Critical Security Studies, Radical Security Studies, Peace research Subjective Reflectivist

power (hard and soft) as the primary instrument for state survival and international order. It is interesting to note that the assumptions behind classical realism are not necessarily materialist: human beliefs, values, hopes and fear are seen as important variables to understand social action, so much so that the already cited Wolfers considered an objective measure of security as politically impossible (Wolfers 1962). Despite individual cultural differences, states are assumed to be rational unitary actors pursuing the same national interest of survival through the accumulation and maximization of power. However, it should be noted that for classical realists security comprises a variety of dimensions beyond military power. The so-called “Golden Age” of Political Science is characterized by the emergence of strategic studies as an independent sub-discipline (McSweeney 1999: 25–44; Walt 1991). Security is primarily seen as a military issue because of the Cold War with its geo-political rivalry, the armaments race, and the need for theories of deterrence. As a matter of fact, Stephen Walt defined security studies as “the study of the threat, use and control of military force (…) the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the way that the use of force affects individuals, states and societies and the specific policies that the states adopt in order to prepare, prevent or engage in war” (Walt 1991: 212). Neo-realism or structural realism is the paradigm of reference (Gray 1982), where the state maintains its centrality in an anarchical international structure and can survive only on the basis of material power and the defense of its physical and territorial sovereignty. Material and quantifiable factors are essential given the positivist scientific method claimed by this political “scientific” methodology: this is why states are considered as unproblematic and uniform objects; rigorous objective causal laws are identified; and even human variables are materialized in mathematical models for the sake

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of military planning. Threats are material and foreseeable because they are represented by other states and can be counteracted by an increase of military and economic power. Since states are deemed to behave in the same way because they all want to maximize their national interest and balance the power of the others, a security dilemma is inevitable because the acquisition of means of power to improve one’s security provokes others to follow suit so that the initiating state is as insecure as before (Glaser 1997). This realpolitik is dictated by the anarchical nature of the international structure (defined by the distribution of capabilities) and not necessarily by the individual choices of states (Waltz 1979; Mearsheimer 1990). The Political Economy approach calls for a wider concept of security that includes not only state territorial survival but also and more importantly economic and normative components. Initially developed in the period of détente in the 70s when economic and in particular energy issues were seen as threats to the acquired life-style (Nye 1989; Keohane and Nye 1989; Sorensen 1996), it comprises now a variety of paradigms or schools of thought. In general, the security agenda is said to be dominated by economic and environmental (Ullmann 1983; Mathews 1989) rather than military issues because “complex interdependence” inhibits the use of force in the relationships between states and impacts the definition and hierarchization of interests (Keohane and Nye 1989: 24–28). As a consequence of interdependence, for the liberal paradigm, “common”, “co-operative”, “collective”, or “comprehensive” security transcends the security dilemma: neo-liberal institutionalism in particular stresses how multilateral regimes and institutions, rather than self-help, are the rational response to anarchy. Critics suggest however that this liberal approach is based on key realist terms of reference and foundational categories, and that the only contribution to the discussion is limited to the application of the structural concept of security to an enlarged agenda (Bull 1966; Buzan 1991: 373) so broad that it actually endangers the intellectual coherence of the concept, devoiding it of its essential meaning (Walt 1991). Despite the fact that social constructivism contains a variety of different strands and escapes univocal paradigmatic definition, from the perspective of security its moderate form can be included into this “Political Economy” approach (Adler 1997a; Checkel 1998; Hopf 1998; Price and Reus-Smith 1998; Guzzini 2000; Haas EB 2001; Zehfuss 2002). An important difference between moderate constructivism and liberalism in security studies is that the widening is not limited to the dimensions of security issues, but it extends to the inclusion of different levels of analysis, actors, and referent objects (Finel 1998: 8). From an ontological perspective, while liberalism maintains the same suppositions about state structure and anarchy as realism, constructivism in general considers state interests as not pre-given but subject to change and redefinition as a result of mutual constitution between agents (states) and structures (norms). Threats are thus the product of an intersubjective dynamics, and they do not necessarily exist “out there”. Ideas, beliefs, and perceptions play a determinant role in the definition of the structure or environment, and define the realm of the cognitive possible

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(Katzenstein 1996; Yee 1996). It is assumed that ideas and interests of actors are socially constructed by collective understandings and interpretations about the world (Adler 1998). This does not mean that moderate social constructivists reject the objectivist methodology of realism and liberalism: they still assume that states are rational actors and that their interests are constructed by the structure of the international system, which in their view is the product of both material and social or cognitive relationships (Wendt 1992). The Copenhagen School is one of the leading representatives of this approach in security studies: Buzan and Waever and De Wilde 1998 and a number of other contributions did not only expand the understanding of the concept of security, but they introduced a ground-breaking explanation of the mechanisms of security processes through the introduction of the idea of “securitization” (Waever 1995a; Albert 1998; Aradau 2001 etc.) with its central focus on the role of the actor’s identity in shaping the structure (more in Chapter 3). Finally, the Sociology approach encompasses more radical strands of social constructivism and what is called “Critical Security Studies”: based on a subjectivist epistemology this approach draws from critical theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. The accent is on the cognitive dimension of structural constraints: applied to security this means that the referent objects as well as the threats are problematized and re-conceptualized to include a variety of dimensions and “communities”, and that the individual level is given predominance in the analysis (Williams and Krause 1997; Krause 1998; Weldes and Laffey et al. 1999; CASE Collective 2006). A number of different schools of thought are included in this approach: from the Aberystwyth school of Wyn Jones 1999 and Booth 2005 to post-structuralism of Klein BS 1994; Dillon 1996; Campbell 1998; Der Derian 1987; Walker 1993, Dalby 1997 and 2000, and Peace Research (see COPRI; SIPRI etc.). For the sake of the analysis and simplification, these four broad groups can be sub-divided into two camps labelled “traditionalist” and “innovator”. Traditionalists favor the maintenance of a military and state-centric conception of security, and argue that widening and deepening only add confusion to policymaking; innovators claim that attention should be focused on both the state and individual level (with a predominance of the second for many) and that security is not only military but has also important environmental, social and, economic dimensions (Tarry 1999). Both sides contain variations and are criticized by the one or the other: traditionalitsts are accused of being too narrow-minded, while innovators are deemed to water down the concept (Moeller 2000a). What is of relevance in this discussion is that these theoretical controversies are translated and adopted at the political discourse level, and the allegiance to the one or the other approach on the part of the policy communities profoundly shapes discourses and policy choices.

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Grand Strategy, Policy Preferences, and Action Security is not only a concept, but it is also a practice. Abstract and theoretical discussions have an impact on policy action (what is done) and behavior (how it is done). In the security policy realm, concepts are an integral part of “grand strategy”, and constitute operational tools for policy formulation and implementation. The components of the concept of security (the definition of the threats and the referent objects) directly influence the policy and the instruments chosen. Before discussing the determinants of the policy, it is necessary to define the level of analysis we are using. It should be noted that the following discussion draws from traditional conceptualizations of “national” security policy, where military force plays a dominant role. Since however force is considered as one of many instruments of how to do security also in “innovative” approaches, and grand strategy represents an overall tool of action, it is important here to digress on its utility for the definition of the practice of security. Of particular relevance is also the fact that the EU has been often called to develop a strategic concept (Van Staden et al. 2000; Biscop 2002), and it also eventually issued a “strategy” (see Chapter 6), but the level at which this document operates has not been defined or analyzed in depth, so that it is unclear what role the document plays in the development of the ESDP or of the EU security identity in general. Grand Strategy and Security Concept Grand strategy is “not merely a military but a social science” (Saregaunt and West 1941: 7). Although the most recurrent use of the term is in the context of national security, the meaning of strategy varies on the basis of the discipline in which it is applied. Interestingly however, the etymology of the word has a military connotation since the Greek word strategos, from which strategy stems, means in Greek “General”. The fact that the military is nothing else than the bureaucratic organization of the use of force explains why strategy is common currency in organizational theory. Mintzberg (1995: 13–14) has created a 4 Ps model for the definition of strategy: for him strategy can be a) a plan for a consciously intended course of action, or a guideline for dealing with a certain set of situations; b) a ploy or a plan with a more narrow and specific scope; c) a pattern of emerging actions and behavior, which, not preconceived, show consistency in the reactions towards inputs coming from the environment; and d) a perspective which defines the way the organization’s members view the organization’s environment, the organization’s identity and themselves as members of the organization. This definition however confounds different levels of analysis, and does not really qualify strategy given that plan, ploy, pattern, and perspective are not synonymous. The application in the context of national security and military policy in particular is much more precise because levels of analysis and of action are organized hierarchically: grand strategy provides perspective; strategy is the plan; operations are the ploy; and tactics can be assimilated to a sort of “patterned

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ploy”. National security strategy or grand strategy thus contains the underlying and guiding concepts which encapsulate perceptions of the environment, aspirations, and in particular the definition of referent objects and threats as formulated by the national leaders and policy-makers. Military force is only one of the means available to achieve foreign policy goals and in particular security and defense. As a matter of fact, grand strategy can be described as “the art and science of developing and using the diplomatic, economic, and informational powers of a nation, together with its armed forces, during peace and war to secure national objectives” (US Department of Defense 2001: 358) or as “that part of government policy having as its objective the creation of national and international political conditions favourable to the protection or extension of vital national values against existing and potential adversaries (Trager and Simonie 1973: 36). Grand strategy as the “collection of military, economic and political means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security” (Rosecrance and Stein 1993: 4) is thus the guiding instrument of foreign policy and encompasses security and defense. Foreign policy is not only about a state’s relationship with the outside world: it is an inside-out process whereby the values, norms, and principles constituting a political community internally (the identity) are projected into the global system (Campbell 1998). Most importantly for the future discussion of the EU Common Foreign, Security, and Defense Policy it should be noted that there is a dialectical relationship between foreign policy and sovereignty because the institution of foreign policy strengthens the territorial delimitation of the unit by setting the terms of inclusion (internal/domestic) and exclusion (external/foreign) and by claiming independent power of action and representation for a central authority. Grand strategy includes policy choices about: how (way or concept) the leadership will use the power available (means or resources) to the state to exercise control over sets of circumstances and geographic locations to achieve objectives (ends) that support state security interests and values. Ends indicate “what” is to be accomplished in terms of the interests or the referent object that should be defended or promoted (answering the question in order to do what?). Ways explain “how” the ends are to be achieved by the employment of resources. Means finally determine what specific tangible or intangible resources are to be used. Grand strategy, at the highest political level, is thus a “document” which should assure the coherence, consistence, and coordination of the whole complex (Foster 1992: 72). As mentioned above, it should be stressed that grand strategy and strategy are not synonymous, although they are often confused. In particular, following Clausewitz and Liddell-Hart, strategy is “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfil the ends of policy” (Liddell-Hart 1967: 335–336) or “the use and threat of use of organized force for political purpose” (Gray 1999:1), that is, strategy refers to the modality and use of a determinate type of means prescribed in a grand strategy, at a higher hierarchical level. In this sense war is a means and not an end in itself. In fact, in partial implementation of grand strategy, security policy can be defined as the choice of the strategy, the establishment of structures, and the creation and maintenance of instruments for the protection of state and alliance targets from

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external dangers (Wellershoff 1999: 18), which “may comprehend the use of an extensive variety of means to address actual or potential external military threats” (Duffield 1998:14), and which defines the conditions and limitations of the way force should be used (Lange 1992). Interestingly this conception of security is very much linked to defense rather than security per se. National security is concerned first and foremost with values and with the political conditions in which those values can flourish. Because of its potentially destructive consequences, military power is used only when failure to do so would result in an intolerable sacri.ce of some vital national value. The obvious criterion is the relative weight of endangered values and risks involved in deciding for war. This is the most critical decision any policymaker in the national security system of any country will ever have to make (my emphasis) (Trager and Simonie 1973: 36).

This means that military force is only one of the means to preserve and enhance values and interests (aims). Other instruments include a full array of foreign policy measures ranging from diplomacy (persuasion and rewards) and economic aid to coercive diplomacy (threats, sanctions, limited force) (Kennedy 1991: 5; Holsti KJ 1995: 125–126) as well as what is called “soft power” or the power of attraction/ emulation deriving from the level of prosperity and openness that the country or unit has achieved (Nye 2004: 5). The decision about what specific means to use is usually assumed to stem from a rational cost-benefit calculation, but as it will be discussed, this rationality contains normative variables which influence the weighting of values. For what concerns the ends (goals or objectives), it should be noted that security is not the end in itself but it is one of the means to achieve the end identified usually in terms of values and interests. Wolfers for instance distinguishes between milieu goals and possession goals: the first ones refer to the interests of shaping the international environment to one’s favour like peace, stability, or international law; while the second ones indicate the willingness to preserve or enhance more measurable values or material interests like territory and resources. Interestingly, milieu goals may also be means towards the attainment of possession goals. Wolfers’ distinction between ideological and traditional goals is blurrier because it is not clear whether ideological aims are also milieu aims or whether they can constitute possession goals of some sort (Wolfers 1962: 73–75).

 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� In particular where the aim is to manage or resolve a conflict the means can be: official diplomacy (track-one) including mediation, coercive diplomacy, and peacemaking (UN understanding); non-official diplomacy; education; military measures like threat/ projection/use of force, arms embargoes and blockades, peacekeeping, peacemaking (state and EU understanding), etc; economic and social measures like sanctions and aid; and political measures and governance (Creative Associates International 1996).

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Problematic in the discussion of aims and means is their relationship: do capabilities (means) influence functionally and geographically the ends (priorities and political goals?); or is there an instrumental link between ends and means and objectives come before the means? The Machiavellian adage that the ends justify the means – ethically and morally controversial – is not always applied in practice, since there seems to be a certain automatism which tends to define the ends and the values to be protected on the basis of what means are available. The issue is complicated by the fact that a grand strategy contains a set of priorities and preferences and not policy decisions concerning the actual implementation of aims, means, and ways. In the EU context, the term security concept is intended in the sense of grand strategy: A European security concept is an essential policy tool that, starting from our interests and values, outlines the long-term overall objectives that we want to achieve and the basic categories of instruments that we will apply to that end. It is a strategy that serves as a reference framework for day-to-day policy-making in a rapidly evolving complex international environment (Coolsaet and Biscop 2003: 2).

Grand strategy is thus a theory about how a unit can best produce security for itself (Posen 1984: 25). This theory is built on three building blocs: determination of vital security interests and political goals (possession and milieu goals), identification of threats and challenges to those very aims, and outline of the line of action to address those threats. As a set of preferences and priorities however, this theory is not practice. For the sake of this study, practice subsumes both behavior and action. In particular, it is defined in terms of “outputs” and “outcomes”. “Outputs” are the products of the policy choices made by the decision-makers, that is, the setting up of the hardware of the EU crisis management machinery (institutional and material). “Outcomes” refer to the practical applications of the policy measures on the ground (Almond and Powell 1978). So what is the role of a theory for practice? A grand strategy contains regulative and constitutive norms which constrain and enable action – as for instance rules of engagement do at the operational level – directly impact the policy agenda, and determine the functional dimensions of security policy in institutional and operational terms (Keatinge 1996: 3). Externally, grand strategy is seen as the identity card of the unit or organization, since it performs a communicative act and informs the other actors of the broad intentions of the subject. Determinants of Security Preferences and Choices Preferences are however not choices. Preferences are rhetorical priorities which define the realm of the possible, while a choice is an action which entails a final decision among different and competitive possible courses of action.

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How are these preferences determined? Where do they come from? What is the independent variable, the crucial factor which causes decisions? Or better, what is guiding the choice of one end or one means rather than the other and the definition of a particular security concept? What are the sources of security policy and grand strategy in general? Obviously there are as many answers as there are paradigms and different approaches. In general, laundry lists abound: geography, history, culture, economics, and governmental systems are all seen as important factors (Williamson et al. 1994: 23). For instance Duffield lists and explains all the possible factors which, in a way or another, influence and determine the security policy of a state. On the one side, there are external variables such as the international setting, the international structure, and the international institutions; on the other, he proposes a menu of internal elements: national capacity, national predispositions (ideas/political culture, national institutions), and policy process (Duffield 1998: 15). The problem of working with a framework of analysis which merely identifies and describes the full variety of factors possibly determining or even only influencing the dependent variable – in this case security policy – is that no important causal relationships are highlighted. There is no relative weighting of the variables. This means that the list does not help to explain or even understand what elements are crucial in the definition of a determinate security policy. There are no theoretical underpinnings of sort. For a theory to be falsifiable, one source should be chosen as the determinant (otherwise, if all the listed sources contribute to the output, then the cause is undecided). What is the relative value of these sources? Theories link in a coherent framework otherwise separate elements. On the basis of different levels of analysis, three basic approaches can be singled out in explaining the sources of security policy (Duffield 1998). On the one hand, realism argues that the external environment dictates the preferences of the actor, and since the structure of the international system is anarchic and states are considered to react in the same way to this context, preferences and behaviors of different states are treated as similar and in competition. On the other hand, liberalism stresses the importance of domestic sources and explains how states who find themselves in similar environmental situations may behave in different ways. Rosecrance and Stein (1993) claim that, since “grand strategy is public policy and reflects a nation’s mechanisms for arriving at social choices (…) [which] require the commitment, extraction, and mobilization of societal resources (...) domestic groups, social ideas, the character of constitutions, economic constraints (sometimes expressed through international interdependence), historical social tendencies, and domestic political pressures play an important, indeed, a pivotal role in the selection of grand strategy” (Rosecrance and Stein 1993: 13). Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” intended as the internal domestic order is also assumed to affect, directly or indirectly, the behavior of a security actor (Foucault  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� These �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� approaches or theories or discourses will be retaken in Chapter 4 to show how they are incorporated into actual political discourses and action.

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1991b). Finally, a third approach operates at the individual level and considers unit (or state) behavior as flowing from the individual decision makers’ ideas and perceptions of the situation. This “cultural” approach is the one chosen for this book. As a matter of fact, in order to be coherent, accepted as the projection of the unit’s identity and perspective, and implementable, a grand strategy needs to be based on a common set of assumptions and a shared conceptual framework, which organically explain how to relate means to ends, how to achieve objectives and promote valued and interests, and how to protect against threats in the most efficacious way. What ultimately matters is what exists in the minds of policymakers and, even more importantly, how this translates into an approach to security. The choice of referents, means, and ways characterizes the quality of the deriving security and defense policy and, in particular, it determines whether power is used in a coercive or persuasive way. As it will be argued in the following, the selection and combination of the resources as well as the process of identifying ends and interests arise from assumptions about self identity, culture, quality of life priorities, and the definition of the rights worth defending. Grand strategy represents thus the purview of the elites and cascades from the comprehensive political Weltanschauung of the state or organization under examination.

Assumptions, Ideas, and Values Since Walker’s complaint that culture had been until then relatively neglected in IR (Walker 1990), an impressive proliferation of culture-based research has generated many different ways and methodologies of studying cultural and ideational variables as causal or at least intervening variables in relationship to behavior and action at the international level. Central in anthropology and psychology in the 1930s and 1940s, introduced in political science in the 1940s and 1950s under the connotation of political culture, since the 1970s culture had indeed fallen into disrepute or was used as a mere explanation of last resort (Elkins and Simeon 1979: 129–137; Desch 1998). Not surprising culture as any other abstract concept was and is accused of being fluffy and ambiguous, and in a period dominated by positivist “scientific” aspirations, untestable. The importance of perceptions in the formation of a security concept calls however for a re-evaluation of the so-called “soft” variables: the central question is why different actors often perceive the same problem in radically different ways as well as why certain threat images take on societal salience and others do not. Security and perception are theory-driven: decision-makers tend to see what they expect to see, and these expectations are often driven by stereotyped lessons of history, analogies, or routine scripts that provide shortcuts for making assessments under uncertainty (Jervis 1976). These group-taught or learned perceptions are the result of a process of filtering through decoding mechanisms inherent in a culture (Singer MR 1998). As mentioned above, since theories are made out of ideas, it is interesting to question how and in what form, if at all, ideas influence the

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construction of a security concept and, as a corollary, of a security grand strategy. How important is the intersubjective component of security? How does culture affect the choice of means and values/aims (Swindler 1986)? How does culture lead to action? This section aims at reviewing the role of ideational variables in the construction of a security concept and in influencing the formation of a grand security strategy and their impact on behavior and action. It will be argued that preferences and interests are not exogenous, but are “the joint results of sociological as well as psychological forces acting upon the individual” (Rokeach 1973: 20) and constitute a value-system intended as an “enduring organization of beliefs concerning preferable modes of conduct or end-states of existence along a continuum of relative importance” (Rokeach 1973:5). Taken collectively, these preferences are based on a system of shared meanings and understandings (assumptions) on how the world works, which contribute to create a sense of common social identity (Laitin 1988: 589). This identity of beliefs, values, and preferences, embedded in the language and reshaped by the interpretation of external and internal developments, is essential for the construction of an effective foreign and security policy (Hill and Wallace 1996: 8). Ideology, Culture, and Identity: Between Context and Behavior Concepts and ideas do not float freely, but they are anchored to a context, and they react upon changes occurring in the ideal and material environment. The relationship between values, beliefs, and identity on the one side, and concept mapping and meaning on the other is thus of central importance for cognitive consistence and coherence (Jervis 1976). As it has been discussed earlier, the fact that security is very often described as the absence of threats to acquired or scarce values indicates the fundamental role played by the subjective (at the individual or collective level) attribution of appreciation and desirability to objects in the form either of material interests (like physical survival) or ideal principles (like for instance democracy). The specific ideology or Weltanschauung of the leaders (or speakers) has a direct impact on how the culture and the identity of the organization are externally represented and perceived. Security intended as a system or an organized and coherent structure can thus be seen as the product of a particular ideology: a form of social cognition fostering order in meaning by providing templates as filters for the purpose of information gathering and classification around “core constructs” of truth, normality, and knowledge (Balkin 1998) or even a political agenda at times compromising objectivity (Geertz 1994: 279). As it will be argued in the discussion about language as action, the Marxist connection between power and manipulation of meaning performed through ideology as a way to shape cognitive and affective interpretations of values, conceptions of the world, and symbol systems, in order to legitimize the existing hegemonic order may be of particular relevance in the formulation of security concepts and utterances (on different variations about the theme, see

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Adorno, Althusser, Gramsci, Foucault, Hall and others in Bianchi et al. 2002), especially when the ideological system of beliefs and representations is shared and accepted by the members of a group as a cultural common ground that is non-controversial and commonsensical (Van Dijk 1998). Moreover, ideology does not only help in the interpretation and rationalization of behavior, but it may also have ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� normative implications for behavior itself (Hinich and Munger 1994). ������� In the case of the concept of security in the European Union for instance, the ideology, either professional or socio-political, of the political elite and of the epistemic community plays a determinant role in the determination and distribution of a specific significance and, as a consequence, of the substance of the policy program associated to it. Ideology in its neutral sense hence works when it is developed in a consistent culture. Obviously, as it is the case for a variety of “thick signifiers” (Huysmans 1998b), there is much disagreement about the word and concept of “culture”. Der Derian convincingly claimed that security and culture can be considered as “sponge” words “in the sense that they can soak up a variety of operational meanings but at some saturation point they begin to leave a logical and functional mess behind” (Der Derian 1987: 31). Culture is considered to act as a template, a guide, a model shaping consciousness and behavior from generation to generation in a reflexive way: the pattern is not fixed but it adapts to changes in the society (Geertz 1973:216). Developed at first as an anthropological tool of analysis, a variety of definitions and conceptual systems exists (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963). For Samuel Barnes, it is useful to distinguish three levels of analysis of culture: a) what can be directly observed, including�������������������������������������������������� artifacts���������������������������������������� , symbols, and behavior; b) beliefs and values; and c) shared assumptions and meanings (Barnes 1988: 2). ������������ Focusing in particular on this last point, Geertz argues that culture should be considered as a “web of significance”, a system of meanings, of negotiated agreements on the set of relationships between one group of variables (a word, behavior, or other symbol) and its corresponding significance or meaning (Geertz 1973: 4–5), or a cognitive system defined and accepted by a group to simplify the environment through a series of mental constructs including beliefs and assumptions (Fischer 1997: 23). The accent is on the sociality of the meaning, on the fact that it has to be shared and common in order to be understood. The construction of the meaning of security, like behavior and language, rests on a backbone of cultural and ideological elements: the identification of the values to be secured is directly dependent on their relative position in a scale of importance and priority. Of course, culture is a holistic term: it can and it should be broken down in levels and dimensions. For this research, emphasis will be devoted to the organizational/institutional level (the political, administrative and academic community) and to the political-strategic dimension (the place of war and peace and the use of force). Finally, it is important to highlight that culture and ideology are directly connected to the identity of the leaders or the unit at large. As a matter of fact,

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the cultural template does not only provide the ordering pattern for thoughts, ideas, and norms (regulative effects); it constitutes them and, as a corollary, it is internalized and integrated into roles and identities (constitutive effects) (Wendt 1987; Katzenstein 1996). Identity is here understood as a basic unit of belonging, multi-level and multi-dimensional, arbitrating between the self and the rest: a claim of distinctiveness and uniqueness, either internally or externally defined. The development of a specific identity and its modification and recognition is a product of social interaction and communication and it is embedded in a cultural and ideological context through the mediation of significant symbols. The definition of an identity (who you are) on the basis of categories such as for instance race, gender or nationality at the individual level or political, economic or social system at the collective one implies the reference to a classification that is conventionally accepted, cognitively internalized, and emotionally charged. It also means to establish relatively sharp and stable boundaries between inside and outside, between what or who you are and what or who you are not. The answer to the question: are you a state, are you a democracy, are you peace-loving, are you a superpower, depends on how the others define you on the basis of the common description of the symbols of “state”, “democracy”, “peace” but also on the subjective self-perception and the strength of the social values and roles acquired through the processes of “acculturalization” or social learning of symbols (see for instance Bretherton and Vogler 1999 on actorness and Chapter 6 and 7 for the empirical evidence). Is culture only a context for behavior, does it constitute behavior itself, or does it cause it? In the first case, it merely influences behavior in a way which is not directly predictable or measurable; in the second case, if culture is behavior, it means that values and ideas are constitutive and not only regulative. This is one of the fundamental puzzles not only in IR but in the social sciences in general. Directly linked to the actor-structure debate, the scholarly dilemma is organized around the question of whether culture is an independent or dependent variable. At the very least, culture influences how people perceive their goals and the range of alternative actions considered (Barnes 1988). But in which way? Goldstein and Keohane (1993) considered three types of beliefs which define the universe of possibilities for action in the form of worldviews, principled beliefs, and norms about cause-effect relationships (Goldstein and Keohane 1993: 8). It should be noted that worldviews in particular not only include assumptions about the environment, but they encompass prescriptions about the appropriate courses of action (Young 1998: 215), while beliefs set up expectations which form the basis of interpretation (Voss and Dorsey 1992: 11). On the one hand culture provides the categories of understanding enabling an actor to behave, and on the other it provides rules of action constraining that same behavior (Goldstein and Keohane 1993: 15–16). The same does identity: “In telling you who you are, identities strongly imply a particular set of interests or preferences with respect to choices of action in particular domains, and with respect to particular actors” (Hopf 1998: 175).

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This is related to the central question of constructivism, or how norms shape the behavior of states (for a distinction between culturalism and constructivism see Farrell 2002; Desch 1998). For Katzenstein, norms are both constitutive of an actor’s identity and regulative of its behavior (Katzenstein 1996: 18–19). Structures constitute actors through meaning, while actors shape the structure through practices (Wendt 1987). Giddens’ structuration theory closes the circle by claiming that there is a recursive relationship between actors and structures (Giddens 1984: 8). Cultures are “grand theories” or paradigms which organize perceptions by selecting relevant information which is the basis for the formation of preferences (Wildawsky 1987: 16–17), and which at the moment of action provide “the elements of grammar that define the situation, that reveal the motives, and that set forth a strategy for success” (Hudson 1997: 28–29). In our discussion, the interpretation and choice of the values to be secured, and ceteri paribus, of the means to be used in defense is closely linked to assumptions about culture and identity. The role that culture plays in shaping the interests and behavior of the actors, their normative arguments and expectations, is hence of paramount importance in the determination of a security identity (Katzenstein 1996: 2). Whether the EU is labeled as a “human” or territorial, a civilian or military power depends not only on the “objective” state of affairs, that is, the effective capabilities and actions: the categorization encompasses a discursive and prescriptive dimension (the projection of expectations) anchored to the original normative aims of the Union in general and “expressed” in terms of common values and interests. The stress on peace, human rights, and democracy is thus more than a banner: it defines who the Union is or wants to be and who it is not or does not want to be, at least at the declaratory level. The link between “expression”, meaning, and reference passes through the interrelationship between identity and culture (and/or ideology) and is mediated by language and discourse in a constant struggle for legitimation and recognition (Kramsch 1998: 10). Political, Security, and Strategic Culture Culture is a broad notion. Like an onion, it can be qualified both horizontally (its dimensions) and vertically (in relation to the levels or units of belonging). In the context of security, political culture plays a role in defining the precepts and preferences of security: it includes assumptions about the political system and its constituting values widely shared within the society or by its political elites. Political culture is defined as the internalized attitudes – cognitive, affective, and evaluative – towards the political system, and towards the role of the individual in that system (Almond and Verba 1966: 13–17) that reflexively interact with the political structure (Almond and Powell 1978: 25–26). Political assumptions can be seen as taken-for-granted “mind-sets” or dispositions towards a particular set of behaviors, enabling or constraining the range of acceptable possible alternatives: as such, they are limited to “setting the agenda” or “ordering political priorities” through the influence of particular elites or “hegemonic blocs” (Laitin 1986: 171),

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but they do not determine in an exclusive way which actions will be chosen (Elkins and Simeon 1979: 128–131). As a matter of fact, what is interesting in the context of security is in particular the political and diplomatic culture of the elites, that is, the complex of values and perceptions (intellectual and moral) possessed by the official representatives of states or international organizations (Bull 1987: 316). The existence of a determinate political culture thus influences the perception of security and the determination of aims, means, and ways in a grand strategy. By the same token, security actions do hit back and go to shape culture. Howorth argues that political culture is the product of culture and politics: culture is a relatively static and essentialist component created by a society with a common identity, while politics entails a functionalist organization of institutions and structures set up with a common purpose (Howorth 2000a: 87). This conceptualization is important because it explains how both context and behavior are contained in the notion of “political culture”. In the EU case, these assumptions about the general political system influence both the identity of the Union and its actions. When analysing the sources of a security concept and policy, general political assumptions constitute the overall context in which the grand strategy is developed, and they frame the identification of the content of values and interests for a unit: however, they do not generally directly focus on security. Security and strategic culture, as sub-cultures of political culture, offer more specific indications of the preferences of the subject. Security culture can be defined as a set of enduring and shared assumptions, beliefs and attitudes about threats and referent objects, while strategic culture refers to the means deemed appropriate to make security. Krause’s distinction between security culture as referring to perception of interests, and strategic culture as possessing both a domestic and an international dimension does not really help in understanding what the functions of the two types of culture are (Krause 1999: 12–14). At the bottom of the search for explanations of state behavior in the international system and in particular of the emergence of war or the endurance of peace, together with history, geography, decision-making structures etc. normative constraints to the use of force have been recognized to play a decisive role (Kegley and Raymond 1986). It should be noted that the majority of the literature considers only strategic and not security culture as important in the formulation of security policies. In the following the two will be considered as a coherent whole. Security/strategic culture intervenes in directing the orientation of the grand strategy. Although other variables play a central role in the determination of the planning, that is for instance environmental, economic, logistical and opportunity factors, culture influences the predisposition and inclination toward the selection of the one or the other end, means, or way. Again the debate is on whether culture is a context for action or constitutes behavior (Poor 2003). Following the recount of Colin Gray (Gray 1999b: 1), there are three generations or groups of strategic culture scholarship, and the variations on the meaning and causal functions of the variable differ accordingly. Although Gray and others categorize scholarship in terms of time-bound generations in order to delineate the history of the concept

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– as it was the case for security – the distinction into groups or approaches which continue across time and are contemporary seems to be a more appropriate way of presenting the discussion. Moreover, in general, all the following approaches refer to “national” culture, and it is not clear whether their conceptualizations can be easily transferred to states or other entities. It is assumed here that similar mechanisms affect organizations dealing with security, whether private or public, or in Gray’s terms, “a particular geographically based security community that has had a unique historical experience” (Gray 1999b: 131; see also Tsakoloyannis 1996; Adler 1997b). For the first generation of classical realists, strategic culture is “the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of a national strategic community share with each other with regard to [nuclear] strategy”, and which have acquired a state of semi-permanence as a result of a socialization process (Snyder 1977: 4, 8). Booth adds that these “traditions, values, attitudes, patterns of behavior, habits, symbols, achievements and particular ways of adapting to the environment” refer in particular to problems related to the threat or use of force (Booth 1979: 121). Devised in order to understand and explain the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, these definitions are part of anthropological models used for drawing the connections between culture and state behavior in so called “national character studies” (Elkins and Simeon 1979). Political and strategic culture is considered as one in a range of variables that constrain strategic choice: it represents the aggregate of attitudes and patterns of behavior of the political and military elites, in short, the approach of a nation or group or organization on issues of war and peace. This means that, contrary to neo-realist rational determinism, cultural differences are relevant in explaining behavior in the international environment. For Gray, behavior is a constituent part of culture and cannot be studied separately: these assumptions with respect to force derive from the “perception of the national historical experience, from aspirations for responsible behaviour in national terms” (Gray 1981: 36). Culture incorporates both patterns of behavior and ideas, values, attitudes and expectations, and it is thus a product of both what is thought and said, and what is done. The problem arises when patterns of behavior do not reflect the stated ideas and expectations: where can one empirically find culture if not in behavior? This is in fact the major criticism towards this first generation: that including behavior in the definition suggests a deterministic relation between culture and behavior and fails to identify a causal connection (Johnston AI 1995a: 37–38). The second group studies how culture is used as a discursive tool to legitimize strategic doctrines, and how elites as hegemonic actors are able to manipulate culture in their interests. This observation is generally based on the fact that what decision makers say is often different from what they do (Klein BS 1988: 139): some ideas and rhetorical statements remain just that and fail to have any influence on strategic decision making. This means that behavior is different from culture. The problem is however how then to assess culture per se.

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Finally, the third group represented by the social constructivist approach has been trying to devise a rigorous and positively falsifiable scientific method to the study of strategic culture (Johnston AI 1995a: 48). In this “cultural realist” approach, culture is treated as an independent variable detached from behavior (the dependent variable). For Johnston strategic culture is: an integrated system of symbols (i.e. causal axioms, languages, analogies, metaphors, etc.) that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious (Johnston AI 1996: 223).

These ranked grand strategic preferences are derived from central paradigmatic assumptions about the nature of conflict and the enemy, and they are collectively shared by decision makers (Johnston AI 1995b: ix). In particular, according to Johnston’s model, strategic culture is characterized by beliefs about: a) the orderliness of the strategic environment and the role and frequency of war in human affairs; b) the nature of the conflict, adversary and threat posed (zero-sum or variable sum, the value of unilateralism or cooperation); and c) the efficacy of the use of violence in eliminating threats and achieving the prescribed ends. These assumptions should then directly affect behavior at the operational level, since some option will simply not be imagined as appropriate and effective (Johnston AI 1995b: 223–224; see also Duffield 1998:4; Archer et al. 1998). For the sake of this research, strategic cultural postulates influence grand strategic preferences, that is, the preliminary choice of diplomacy, economic or military resources and their coordination for the attainment of determined ends. It should be stressed again, however, that cultural assumptions – both political and strategic – do not absolutely determine behavior, and there is no direct and univocal causal relationship between culture and strategy. Rather, culture functions as a variable influencing the hierarchical order of preferences, that is, for instance whether official diplomacy or economic sanctions are believed to be more efficacious than military measures. A strategic culture displaying high values in the variables considered is thus a sign of a tendentious predisposition towards hard realpolitik. Still, the final output, that is, the security strategy and policy that follow, is only facilitated, enabled or constrained by the existence of determinate institutions, cultural norms, moral and ethics. External constraints, convenience, opportunity or other case-related factors may play a more determinant role in practice. The poles hard realpolitik and idealpolitik are only ideal-types in a continuum of strategic outputs (Johnston AI 1996: 224). The existence of determinate assumptions enable the construction of informed expectations about the course of action that will be taken by the decisionmaking elites. Culture, building upon fears and perceived threats consistent with

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internalized worldviews, operates as restriction of options and thus delimitation of behavior (Johnston AI 1995b: 162). As already mentioned about all the models related to strategic culture, also Johnston’s units of reference are states, in particular China. However, the model can be easily applied to any other actor operating in the international security arena, given certain “universal” rules of the game that the single actor cannot change (only try to influence). The analysis of the strategic culture of the elites, thus, coupled with the consideration of their particular security situation may lead to cautious predictions about future orientations. At the same time, their strategic beliefs contribute to define their identity either in terms of self-perception or projection (Whitman 1998; Kocs 1994). Unsurprisingly, Gray answered to Johnston’s critique of his own approach by denouncing Johnston’s model, because the latter’s view of strategic culture as contingently prescriptive does not explain change. He maintains that there is no direct relationship between cultural preferences and operational choice because strategic culture is shaping context for behavior and constituting behavior at the same time, thus creating a reflexive circuit between cause and effect (Gray 1999b: 128–136). It is possible to combine Johnston’s and Gray’s approaches using Gidden’s bracketing technique as context defining behavior at time zero and as behavior becoming context at time one (Giddens 1984). The assumption is that actors are strategic in that they take into consideration the context before engaging in an action: this does not mean that their preferences are exogenously given, but that their interpretation of the environment is mediated through a system of meaning or “policy paradigms” that provide “cognitive templates” (Sprout and Sprout 1965; Hay 2002: 209–210). To escape the tautological trap of deriving culture from behavior Berger (TU 1996: 328–329) has suggested to analytically disaggregate policy behaviors and meanings attached by the political actors to those policies (as reflected in public opinion polls, debates, books, and articles written by opinion leaders, that is, discourse – see Chapter 3) and to judge the consistency of behavior and expressed beliefs and values over time: if culture or behavior change without a respective change in the other, then there is no relationship. This consistency would thus falsify the relationship between culture and policy. The problem in Berger’s hypothesis is that he does not specify what he considers behavior, and he seems to assume that discourse is not behavior but something else. How to Apprehend and Measure Culture? Culture is not an easy variable to apprehend and measure. The problem with cultural and ideational variables is that they are hardly quantitative. Moreover, the existence of sub- and counter-cultures begs the question of whether culture is divisible, and if so, how to weigh different beliefs and measure dominance (Jones and Smith 2001). Apart from the endless challenge of definition, criticisms of using culture as an independent variable are very articulated and hit important

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weak points: the problem is not only one of operationalization and tautology, since ideas, values, and norms are enshrined in a physical container of one sort or the other and cannot easily disentangled. Their explanatory function is also questioned, because since they are often anthropologically unique to the case-study and they are “semi-permanent” or slow to change by assumption, they do not lend themselves to cross-national usage and generalization (Desch 1998; Price 1999; Jones and Smith 2001; Glenn 2004). Desch for instance sees strategic culture as a supplementary explanation to structural analyses (Desch 1998: 169). The same challenges are faced by both culturalists and social constructivists (Farrell 2002): how can beliefs be observed if not in social practices? How can one know whether these shared beliefs really exist? It is assumed that beliefs must be expressed and codified, that is, leave physical residues (in public statements and confidential papers of policy and political elites), in order to be considered shared. Yet, the greatest challenge in these theoretical models centered on culture is the methodological question of capturing, identifying, and studying perceptions and assumptions. The choice of the method obviously depends on the paradigm (Wendt 1987: 353–355): if culture is intended as context then expressed preferences are the key, while if culture is intended as behavior then the actual actions and behavior (the preferences in practice) are considered the empirical evidence in support of the theory. The problem with this last approach is that not always there are products to analyze. Preferences expressed are not always transformed into policy and practices: what is their meaning then? Young (1998) and Young and Schafer (2002) comprehensively reviewed the methods used to assess cognition. They identify in particular four dominant methods centered on content analysis: a) operational code based on preferences of goals and means; b) cognitive mapping based on encoding concepts in a subject-verb-object construction; c) image theory based on inferences drawn from verbal descriptions and expressed policy preferences; and d) psychological content analysis and conceptual complexity based on information processing. Constructivists tend to rely on process tracing or historical analysis in order to show the impact of norms on behavioral outcomes through a focus on change and the impact of external shocks causing dissonance (Lantis 2005). In particular and of relevance in this discussion, Johnston and other scholars before him used a cognitive mapping approach. Introduced at first by Robert Axelrod in his seminal “Structures of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites”, this method is informed by mathematics and psycho-logic, statistics, graph theory, evaluation assertion analysis and decision theory and defines a cognitive map as “a pictorial representation of the causal assertions of a person as a graph of points and arrows” (Axelrod 1976: 5–7). Perceptions are thus filtered through a cluster of beliefs and cognitive factors (Holsti 1969; Jervis 1976; George AL 1979a; Larson 1994). Although very promising and innovative, by admission of the very initiators and supporters of this approach, cognitive mapping suffers of several limitations, which compromise the successful conduct of empirical research. The major problem lies in the fact that assertions, documents, and interview material

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have to be evaluated by the researcher, that is, the meaning must be “inferred” or “interpreted”. This also calls in the so-called projection problem, whereby one’s on mindset or expectations are projected onto the object of analysis (Fischer G 1997: 30). In the 1970s, when this method was first presented, interpretation was considered to be an unreliable technique, too impure to conform to the positivist canons of science. This is why Axelrod and friends tried to propose a structural model that could enshrine and translate ideas and beliefs in quantifiable almost material sets of data, points, signed graphs and numbers. As said, the problems were evident from the beginning: the difficulty to access data (the minds of the elites?) and to code it, the necessity to take into consideration the context in order to draw informed inferences as well as the flexibility and magnitude of causation were and still are insurmountable mountains on the road toward explaining the role ideas play in decision-making and action (Axelrod 1976: 251–265). The introduction of computer aided content analysis techniques, quantitative survey analysis, or qualitative analysis of the content of schemas did not solve the epistemological challenge (Mowle 2003). Surprisingly, neither Axelrod nor his younger followers – and Johnston declares to use cognitive mapping without really discussing the merits of his method – consider “assertions” for what they are in practice, that is, declarations, statements, texts, oral or written verbal expressions. Despite frequent references to context and content analysis, no author of this school engaged in a serious assessment of the role of language, and in particular, of the contribution which different strands of linguistic research could supply to the study of policy formation and cognitive analysis. If one considers the organizing and structural role of language – the fact that incoming information are sensed, perceived, catalogued and categorized in a schema of pre-ordained labels, pigeon holes, and words – as well as its deeply social and interactive nature, it makes sense to turn to a detailed analysis of the main tool of communication in order to try to establish a relationship between cultural assumptions on the one hand and predispositions for action on the other. The following chapter proposes to look more in detail at what assertions are, by using language as the litmus test of cognition. European strategic culture is thus intended as ideas, beliefs, expectations that are shared across the actors involved in the processes surrounding European security and defense politics, expressed in a dominant discourse, and consistent with patterns of behavior and action (the ESDP and its implementation).

Chapter 3

Is Talk Really Cheap? Language as an Interface between Culture and Behavior

An important component of the security concept is its intersubjective and ideational construction, which implies an active role of the agent on the structure. Where are security concepts to be found empirically? How can one search the minds of the elites? Whether hard facts or soft variables like norms, values, and ideas can better explain reality and how to empirically detect and prove their respective causal or explanatory power are fundamental questions inflaming never-ending debates and guerres de plume. Implicit in these discussions and exchange of writings is the role of words, language, and communication. Is language a mere mirror of reality, or is it a constitutive component of its construction? Is it a connecting pipe, a functional means, or does it deserve to be treated as an end in itself, as an integral and essential element of the “world out there”? Despite the fierce defense of disciplinary boundaries by some (Linklater 1992: 88), there is a tendency for disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to come closer together or to at least converse with one another and transgress the restrictions of artificial academic compartmentalization. The most evident example is the experiment of bringing together domains such as philosophy, anthropology, history, linguistics, sociology and political science under the common hat of “cultural studies”. Despite facile accusations of superficiality, fuzziness and scientific unsoundness, the exploration and employment of different and unorthodox instruments of analysis – like language and discourse in politics – may contribute to shed light on angles often ignored or subsumed by more traditional approaches, quantitative and qualitative alike. As a matter of fact, theoretical assumptions about language are frequent in political science and IR. Various schools of thought have approached, to different degrees of success, problems of concepts and meaning extrapolating tools from the philosophy of language and cognitive science and applying them to the study of political phenomena, and this does not only concern post-structuralists and post-modernists, but also classical realists like Jervis and his colleagues studying cognitive mapping (see Chapter 2). Prominent strains in foreign policy analysis and comparative politics stress the role of rhetoric in diplomacy and negotiations and the importance of the attribution of conventional or non-conventional meaning to terms of reference for the sake of successful understanding in communication. In this context, the general aim of this chapter is to propose an analytical framework for the study of the concept of security taking language seriously. By scratching off political and ontological qualifications, this section tries to

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explore the cognitive sources of security and the conceptual model associated to it (by English-speakers in this case). The development is based on three major assumptions. First, the epistemological foundations of concept analysis provide the background against which variables such as ideas and culture can be integrated into the model as affecting the way individuals and groups know the world and decide about competing beliefs. Concepts and ideas become axioms which constrain and enable the construction of a determinate ontology (or specification of a conceptualization – see Chapter 4). Vocabulary and categories are reified and become more than just conventions (March and Simon 1958: 165). It is thus crucial to understand where concepts and ideas come from, and how they influence the perception of reality. Second, language is presented as a transmission belt that channels meaning from the realm of ideas to the world of “things” and the other way round. Language is the intervening variable – necessary but not sufficient – in the relationship between ideas and social action. Finally, security is considered, among other things, as a result of linguistic (discursive) practices. Security actions and policies depend upon determinate concepts and systems of ideas (ideology and culture) that are communicated through discourses. The embedded idea of how the world should be – worldview – cognitively influences the perception of how the world is and its discursive construction, that is, the terms used to describe it. In particular, discourse is seen as a set of ideas constituting an identity and a community and as an interactive process of policy construction: context and action however will be kept artificially separated�������������������������������������������� , for the sake of the analysis, in order to avoid tautology�������������������������������������������������������������������� . ������������������������������������������������������������������ Discourse is used as a method, as an interface between culture as context and culture as behavior��. Using syntactical analysis and conventional linguistic categorizations, this research attempts to advance a complementary model for considering the effects of security discourse on security practice. A successful dominant discourse thus structures policy opportunities, policy agenda, and the resulting behavior. This does not mean that more traditional explanations are ruled out, but simply that a more holistic approach is needed in order to understand and explain security processes and policy dynamics (Hollis and Smith 1990: 71–72).

The Instrumental Role of Language: The Transmitting Belt The so-called “cultural turn” in the social sciences did not come alone. It was accompanied by a “linguistic” turn, a renewed interest for the role of language in affecting social processes (Fierke 2002). It is an interdisciplinary response to the traditional approach in political science, which, despite using textual evidence in the form of negotiation records, historical narratives, journalistic and historical accounts of events, policy statements, interviews etc., considers language as transparent, secondary, and empirically weak for political analysis (Milliken 1999; Larsen 1997: 4–10; Mowle 2003).

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In order to further clarify how language is appraised in this study, one major theoretical question has to be addressed: does language construct or represent reality? Does it constitute or simply mirror the world out there? On the one hand post-modernists and reflectivists generally acknowledge that language is central not only from the epistemological but also from the ontological point of view: reality does not exist independently of human agency who, through discourse, literally creates the world. Modernists and rationalists, on the other, claim that material facts are independent variables capable alone of explaining complex social and political relationships. This research is based on a via media, a two-step reasoning that tries to combine, but that inevitably re-elaborates and modifies the above-described assumptions. The first presumption is that there is an independent reality out there: a table is a material object even if it is called a chair. However, and this is the second element, access to reality is mediated by a linguistic and conceptual grid (Hermann 1988: 180). Language can be regarded as a phenomenology: you cannot see, touch, smell, hear and taste ideas, concepts, and beliefs, but you can physically perceive words. In this case, words are “signs” (signifiers), the channel, the connecting pipe, the medium through which ideas are translated into the material world. The word “security” with its qualifying adjectives and its relative phraseology indicates the content of the concept and its relationship with other ideas. When considering language in this research, the focus is more on the production of symbolic meaning, on connotation (meanings are generated by connecting signifiers to wider cultural codes of meaning, syntax and pragmatics) rather than denotation (descriptive and literal, semantics) (Barker and Galanski 2001: 5). The use of language allows for categorization and simplification of the environment (Fischer G. 1997: 29). According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, “the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one thinks and behaves” (cited in Kramsch 1998: 11): apart from the association of different perspectives and worldviews to different tongues, this means that language filters perceptions and channels cognitive structures. For example, the appellation of somebody as terrorist or freedom fighter suggests a whole mental and causal structure, as does the qualification of power as civilian or military. Symbols or words are thus the vehicles through which meaning is given to experience, and political symbols/words are particularly poignant as communicators and solidificators of cultural assumptions (Dittmer 1977; Kramsch 1998). In particular, language in politics reinforces and establishes ideology as common sense: it enables the expression of a specific worldview, but it also constrains any other diverging modes of thought (Orwell 1962). However, to study language per se is not enough: it does not directly help understanding the relationship between ideas and actions, theory and practice. As already hinted at, meaning lies in the use of words and is expounded in pragmatic narratives and social practice. Against structuralism and its mainstream assertion that “signifying practices generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any given person” (Barker and Galanski

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2001: 4) and also against post-structuralists and their claim for the primacy of language and deconstruction above and beyond the actor (Larsen 1997: 11), the main contentions here are that linguistic structures – such as grammar and syntax – are important at a micro level: they are part of an organizational order, an instrument of categorization useful to identify the nature and function of words, and as a reflection, of things. However, at the macro level they are inserted in a broader context requiring not only punctual linguistic analysis (as a status), but a deeper understanding of how the language users, both active and passive participants (speakers and audience), continuously re-negotiate previously acquired subject/ object positions and meanings and connotations (as a process) (Van Dijk 1997b). Karin Fierke in her study on the impact of Wittgenstein for the social sciences refers to these two functions of language: as a static picture providing a “logical scaffolding for how things stand in relation to one another”, and as a dynamic game played by the language users on the bases of shared rules (Fierke 2002: 335). The use of language implies a choice of lexicon and grammatical structures, which is not necessarily conscious, but which is deeply normative: the syntax indicates a way of ordering the world and defining the situation, while uses of grammar reflect intentions and goals (Halliday 1973: 50–52; Hudson 1997: 28–29). Security is hence not only a word or a definition. It is a concept that is communicated in a discourse made up of a complex of interconnected elements. In the field of security studies, this approach is best epitomized by the Copenhagen School and their reference to a “grammar of security” with different dialects according to the specific sector or dimension of security (Buzan and Weaver and De Wilde 1998: 33).

Language: An Object of Study or a Methodology? As grand strategy entails prioritization and ranking of preferences, so the use of language consists of a choice of words and grammar on the basis of a context of performance. Grand strategy is intended as a text; the end product or the higher expression of a discourse, or a range of statements promoting meaning (Milliken 1999; Larsen 2000b). What is the difference between “language” and “discourse”? In general, it is possible to distinguish between discourse with a big D intended as language in use mixed with non-language, and discourse with a little d referring to applied linguistics (Gee 1999: 6–7). In political science, discourse refers to a set of ideas and categories through which meaning is given to objects and events, and it does not necessarily build upon either the big D or little d concepts of discourse in language studies. Discourse does not only entail objects in the form of texts and speeches, but also and most importantly, contexts. Meaning is produced and reproduced through social and situated practices, and it is framed by norms or rules of behavior: this is the thesis of the supporters of “discursive institutionalism” (rather than rational choice, historical, or sociological), for whom discursive practices are the products

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or epiphenomena of cultural assumptions and values. Schmidt and Radaelli 2004, as Fierke 2002 and others have done for language, argue that discourse is constituted by an ideational dimension (cognitive and normative aspects of meaning) and an interactive dimension (elite processes of policy formulation and mass communication) (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004: 197). On the one hand, discourse is thus a structure which provides a context for action, and it is itself action: it contains both linguistic and pragmatic aspects of action. The functions of discourse in politics are varied: apart from providing meaning, explanation, and legitimation for political actions, it contributes to the development of an identity (Connolly 1983; Chadwick 2000; Wodak and De Cillia and Reisingl 2005). In particular, discourse includes not only “positioned representations” of how things are, but more importantly “imaginaries” of how things could be (Fairclough 2003: 23): this means that it is a reliable instrument to assess considered preferences. As it has been pointed out in the discussion about ideology, elites play an important role in the formulation of discourses and the success of a dominant system of meaning. In this book, language and discourse in particular are considered as the physical residues of beliefs and culture; it represents an actor’s self-perception of its identity; and it is deemed as a tool to bridge the gap between institutional and actor-centered analysis, that is, between structure and agency because “social structures have an inherently discursive dimension in the sense that they are inseparable from the reasons and self-understandings that agents bring to their actions (…)” (Wendt 1987: 359). By the same token, if the actions are consistent with the dominant discursive “promises”, then the theoretical dilemma between culture as context or culture as behavior is solved in favor of the hypothesis that a circular relationship culture-behavior (via discourse) exists and that, for the sake of the analysis, it is possible to separate the two variables. As a matter of fact, by introducing discourse as an intervening variable and by bracketing the relationship culture-discourse, it is now possible to complete the circle by looking at the relationship discourse-behavior. By syllogism, if culture (C) equals discourse (D) and discourse (D) equals behavior (B), then culture (C) equals behavior (B) (If C = D and D=B then C=B). If the discourse determines a specific pattern of action, then the cultural attitudes expressed in the dominant discourse finally determine or cause the action/behavior which in turn contributes to the change in the discourse and thus in the cultural assumptions. If we want to prove the effect of culture on behavior and if we assume that a dominant discourse is a mirror of cultural attitudes at a given time, then coherence between discourse and action proves the existence of a determinate security/strategic culture. Discourse is not the object of study of this research, but it is merely used as a heuristic instrument for the analysis of texts (i.e. records of discourse) to explain the relationship between culture and behavior in general, and for what concerns the ESDP in particular. One of the major empirical problem in using discourse as a methodology is to elaborate a model according to which texts can be analyzed in context but kept separated from interpretation. The challenge is to set the boundaries and to decide

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what to include and what to exclude from discourse. For instance, for the sake of this study, policy is considered as “observable” behavior (output), while grand strategy pertains to discourse because it is not directly implementable, or it does not have any legal implications. Discourse is thus the aggregate of public statements on security and its associated policy. Texts are produced by individuals and often by ghost-writers: how can they be representative of the cultural assumptions of an organization? Moreover, individual utterances may be both strategic and normative, and depending on the context, they may be incoherent and contradictory at points. Again, identified consistencies across utterances by different speakers across time and space suggest the adoption of “a common representation despite their privately held views” (Billings and Hermann 1988: 56), and as it will be argued in the section on discourse as action, this consensus at the cognitive level is the basis for the formation of a discursive or epistemic community and the product of social learning: an abrupt change in the dominant discourse because of an endogenous (like a change in leadership) or exogenous event would thus be an indicator of change in assumptions and preferences. From a methodological perspective, discourse analysis here is intended as applied in international law for verifying correct interpretation of a legal text, and it comprises three elements: an objective component centered on the actual text and the analysis of its words and their common sense; a subjective component based on the analysis of the intentions of the speakers which might give a particular connotation to the meaning of the words; a teleological dimension concerning the general object and purpose of the utterance; and in addition a contextual element whereby other texts or circumstances are taken into consideration (Shaw MN 1997: 656–660). This means that discourse has to be considered as a structure in terms of statistical aggregate of texts, and as a product of dynamic interaction between speakers and audience at the level of the policy formulation process.

Language as Structure Typical modern linguistics is chiefly concerned with the study of grammar or of smaller bits of language like sounds (phonetics), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in sentences (syntax). However, in order to understand what role language plays in social and political relationships, it is important to shift the focus to the analysis of the “contextualized use of language”, that is, discourse. In this paragraph we will try to define what the components of discourse are, and how they are ordered (discourse syntax or how the constituent elements are ordered and structured). Why discourse as a structure? Discourse regulates the way information are organized (Barker and Galanski 2001: 12; Foucault 1984). This regulative function is particularly important in a discussion about concept construction: discourse in this sense is a mechanism delimitating borders of orders. Borrowing from Giddens’ structuration theory, these enabling and constraining performances are

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the major cognitive features of discourse (Giddens 1984): the concept of security is manifested, externalized, and delimited in discursive formations and through discursive practices (Foucault 1991a). Discourse as a field of study is considered to be “fuzzy” because it feeds a variety of approaches encompassing different disciplines: traditional linguistics (language use: semiotic, discourse rhetoric, semantics, grammar); cognitive and social psychology (communication and cognition: construction of mental models, processes and representations – social knowledge production); and the social sciences (interaction, speech act and conversational analysis, link with society) (Van Dijk 1997: 1–34). In general, two approaches can be distinguished: a descriptive one interested in studying the evolution of meaning per se, and a critical one (Critical Discourse Analysis) which aims at exploring the relationships of causality between “(i) discursive practices, events and texts, and (ii) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes” (Fairclough 1995: 132), and in particular at studying how changes in the use of language can be seen as a sign of general and social cultural changes in a society. As already emphasized earlier, this is also the endeavor of this book: to identify a connection between security discourse, culture, and identity. The abundance of approaches dealing with discourse is explained by the existence of different dimensions or levels at which analysis can be conducted: a. the immediate language or text co-text; b. the intertextual relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses (allusions, references, inferences, links with other discourses and concepts); c. extra-linguistic variables forming the local context of the situation (aims, intentions, roles of the participants, setting of discourse in time, space, modality); d. the broader socio-political and historical context (global context, fields of action) (Van Dijk 1997a: 19). For the sake of this research this ranking can be summarized and simplified under two headings and scales: “discursive syntax and grammar” (a+c) or micro-level, and material and ideological context or macro-level (b+d). Syntax in linguistic terms refers to the structure of the sentence or how the components object, subject, predicate etc. are organized and spatially located in a relationship, while grammar identifies the internal characteristics of the components, their qualities as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on. Extrapolating from language to discourse, “discursive syntax” indicates the positioning (ordering) and the relative relationship between speakers or subjects, concept or topic of discussion or referent objects, audiences, and discursive actions; while “discursive grammar” specifies who the subjects and objects are and what type of actions are performed. Discourse can thus be considered as the production of concepts,

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Table 3.1

Components of Discursive Syntax and Grammar

Syntax (a) Subject

Grammar or Part of Speech (c) Noun or pronoun (singular or plural, feminine or masculine, personal identity of the subject) + relative adjectives

Predicate

Verb (type of action, mode: passive or active, tense: past, present, future)

Referent Object

Noun or pronoun + relative adjectives

Prepositional Phrases

Adverbs and propositions. References to time (when), space (where), modality (how) etc.

objects, and subject positions which shape the way in which we make sense of the world (Hardy and Palmer 1998; Fairclough 1992). The discursive construction of a concept implies the definition and qualification of a subject, the position of speaker, actor or concept (idea) entrepreneur on the one hand, and the indication of an object which can be intended either as the direct object of the discourse (the topic) or as the receiving target, the audience. The substantial difference against the corresponding traditional linguistic categories lies in the impact of intertextual/interdiscursive connections (b) and the global context (d) for meaning construction and interpretation: these two variables determine the respective content (positioning and qualification) of syntax and semantics. For example, as it will be discussed later, the particular classification of a state or an individual as a referent object, of a government or the international community as a subject, of military defense or humanitarian intervention as a predicate, or of a region or the world as the space of action, depends on the interrelation between previous discourses and ideologies (socio-cultural knowledge: the value of peace or democracy) on the one side, and material and cultural facts on the other (the international system and self-identity). This relationship explains the relative instability of meaning because of context-dependency: change in the context affects discourse and vice versa (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 277). The macro dimensions of discourse are of special interest here because they support the initial hypothesis of a direct link between meaning/concept and culture/ideology via perception of the external reality. The interface between social or cultural beliefs and discursive practices can be explained with the help of communication theory. According to Habermas, a precondition for successful communicative action, and in the first place for understanding, is the existence of a “common lifeworld” (gemeinsame Lebenswelt) provided by among other things a common language (Habermas quoted in Risse 2000: 14, 10). This neutral “ideal speech situation”, however, should be integrated by a more dynamic view of the relationship between concepts and discourse components: communication

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from this perspective is not only a system for information exchange but represents a discursive struggle (negotiation) over meanings, whereby the winner is the dominant or hegemonic discourse (Risse 2000: 16), which naturalizes a particular state of affairs and enables and constrains the practices of the subjects (����� Doty 1993: 314). Hence, ��������������������������������������������������������������������� as highlighted in the discussion about concepts, it should be reiterated that discourse, as a structuring system, is only a layer, an intermediate means for understanding in no case independent from cultural and ideological superstructures. Elements of a Security “Discursive Grammar” A grammar defines how the matrix of variables is organized and functions as a structure for the definition of the relationships (causal or intervening) between its components. The term “discursive grammar” has been coined for the sake of the analysis of security as a discursive field: this model is useful to identify the elements which constitute security utterances, and which contribute to the formation of a discourse. Linguistic analysis and in particular grammatical structures provide the basic framework of analysis in order to start simplifying the complexity of an abstract notion. It is important to highlight that this brief account does not pretend to be exhaustive, but it serves to underline the elements which should be taken into consideration in the construction of a strategic concept. As Huysmans convincingly argues, security is a signifier with a strong performative component through which social relations are organized into security relations (Huysmans 1998b: 232): the allocation of grammatical roles plays an important function in the definition of the concept of security (see for instance Butt et al. 2004 on 9/11). Despite the reference to grammar in many writings on the topic (Fierke 1997; Doty 1993 for example, but many others using discourse), no serious systematic grammatical models have been developed in an attempt to understand how political knowledge is structured beyond the study of metaphors and language games (for instance Thornborrow 1993; Chilton and Lakoff 1995; Bobrow 1996; Chilton 1996a; Larsen 2000b; Huellse 2006). Contexts Before looking into the variables contained in the text, it is important to define the borders of context, intended as everything which is surrounding the text, and which ultimately gives meaning to the utterance. Drawing from anthropology and in particular from the pioneering work of Malinowski, the environment in which a text is situated is both intrinsic (cognitive, affective, and conative) and extrinsic (social, cultural, and interactive) (Halliday 1973), and can be considered as mental models constructed by the participants of or about the situation (Van Dijk 1997b). In particular four dimensions of contexts can be applied to the analysis of security discourses:

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a. the context of situation (situational) defines who is speaking to whom (the role and status of the participants as speakers or receivers), when, where and for what purpose, and the physical setting and conditions of the utterance; b. the context of culture (cultural) contains the institutional norms and rules shaping the mode of interaction and the choice of topics and acts performed in a particular speech community; defines the limits of possibility and normalcy; and sets a common frame of reference. This includes political rules of conduct as well as the structures of political relations and the values purported by the collectivity; c. the co-text is the aggregation of prior or upcoming texts: because of intertextuality, any text is “infected” by the meanings of all the other texts in which the same words have been used (Gee 1999: 55); d. the context of cognition (cognitive) refers to the knowledge (information, intelligence, but also schemata or dominant interpretation of typical situations) available intended as a set of recognizable conventions, rules, norms, and shared assumptions, which inform a process of inferencing (Georgakopoulos and Goutsos 1997: 18; van Dijk 2004). This is connected to the selection of information performed by the speakers. The individuation of these four contexts in the analysis of security discourses should lead to the understanding of how the environment affects not only the specific utterance of the speakers, but also and most importantly their existence and contingent properties altogether (identities, interests, and capabilities) (Jepperson et al. 1996: 41). Security Syntax and Semantics As already pointed out, syntax is the structure or the container, while semantics is the particular meaning or attributes which colors the container. Security is a word with different meanings in different contexts, and the semantics might be contested when embedded in different discourses exactly because it is produced and used in different social, political, and cultural contexts: however, the basic dynamic inherent in the concept is similar across domains (military, financial, computer etc.). The cognitive structures that guide thinking about security are independent of specific and technical conceptualizations, so that it is easy to assume a communicative/syntactical continuity between common language and specialized discourse (Chilton 1996a: 58). As we have seen in the previous chapter, academic and political debates stress that the concept of security is controversial and that it lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations and contextualization (Gallie 1962; Baldwin 1997; Dalby 1997 and many others). This is true only for what concerns the contents of the concept, or better, the qualifying meaning attributed to the single variables of the discourse (semantics). All the same, when talking about this very sensitive set of ideas and images, a specific and generally accepted vocabulary has been developed and allows

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for the formal delimitation of the border of order (Chilton 1996a: 24; McSweeney 1999: 32). General “syntactical rules” of security are not contested, although their specific content may be object of debate. Referent object and threats for instance are only neutral categories to be filled in with a determined qualification on the basis of the situational, cultural, cognitive contexts and the co-text. For example in a common syntactical analysis of the sentence “Tom is reading a book”, Tom is the subject whereby “subject” denotes only the position of Tom in relation to the book (according to the rules of the sentence), but it does not qualify whether for example Tom is a man, an alien, a cat and so on. Syntax simply structures and categorizes the elements of the concept by providing a map of the functions of the single elements [S(subject)+V(verb)+O(object)]: the subject refers to who or what is doing security (or insecurity – in this case, threat); the predicate is the type of action done to implement security; the referent object is the direct object which complements a transitive verb; and finally the prepositional phrases do not only qualify the action, the subject, and the object in terms of time, location, and modality, but also specify the threat. The subject – not to be confused with the theme or the speaker (see contexts) – is the doer of the action or responsible actor. Most importantly, the subject positioning produces actors through the allocation of identity slots (Howarth et al. 2000: 7–15). As it will be discussed in the next chapter, the qualification of the subject includes assumptions about its identity, interests, and values, which directly impact the delimitation of the aims, means, and ways of the whole sentence on the basis of the cultural and cognitive models applied (whether it is a state or another type of entity). The referent object is the answer to the question “what is threatened” or “what should be secured” (Buzan et al. 1998: 36). Central in the discussions about the supposedly widening of the security concept beyond the state, the object may be in terms of material and physical objects or as an abstract idea. Indeed, security is often considered as a referent object in itself: for example, the Anglo-American discourse of security privileges the noun (security) instead of the verb (to secure), because it makes it possible to avoid reference to predication (who is doing security for whom), so that the specific referent objects and subjects do not need to be named, but are subsumed under “security” (what adds to the ambiguity of the concept) (Chilton 1996a: 22). Interestingly, the object and the subject may be coincident, as it is the case for self-defense. Etymologically speaking, the subject is inferior to the object (from the Latin sub which means beneath); however the attribute of sovereignty (from super or above) associated to the subject (a state for instance) inverts the relationship (McSweeny 1999: 23). The tense of the predicate has a central function in security syntax. First of all, it is here assumed that in an ideal-typical security discursive syntax, the verb is transitive, because an intransitive clause would delete any reference to an affected entity, and it would thus hint at grammatical subjects as mere abstractions without conveying any sense of human agency. The fact that in some cases security discourses are built on the intransitive (ex. “there is insecurity”) indicates that

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the speaker tends to avoid attributing responsibility for action and to obfuscate the actual political processes, and this results in rhetorical indeterminacy and no concrete policy actions (the discourse remains a discourse; there is no ensuing behavior). In addition, the use of the active or passive tense is an important indicator of the role of the subject and the object: for example, the sentences “A secures/defends B” and “B is secured by A” are different in the sense that the positioning of A and B respectively defines their scope of action, and indicates whether there is reaction or proaction. The “securitization” action, or the action of framing a problem by using security syntax, will be considered as a pre-condition for the success of the discourse in the next paragraph (see Waever 1995a). Finally, the prepositional phrases are important to define the circumstantial elements of security, and they include indications about the extent of the action (distance, duration), the location (place, time), the manner (means, quality), the cause (reason, purpose), and the contingency (condition) (Halliday 1973: 151). The cause of the action is identified as the threat: as it has been argued in the previous chapter, and as it will be then discussed in the context of securitization, the qualification of this particular prepositional phrase (defend from) in terms of threat, danger, risk, vulnerability, or problem has an important impact on the qualification of all the other prepositional phrases (especially time and ways) and the predicate (proaction or reaction) (see Daase 1991; Liotta 2002). In grammatical sense, that the threat may be material and objective or only subjective indicates two different perspectives: an objective threat is related to the referent object and may be considered as external to the subject (in case of no coincidence between subject and object), while a subjective threat requires an active intervention of the subject, which perceives to have a direct stake in the preservation of the object (subject and object may not be coincidental, but they are closely related). Table 3.2 shows the functions of the elements of the security syntax together with their relative role in grand strategic discourses: the referent object and threat Table 3.2

Simplified Syntax of Security

Syntactical Structure Subject

Security

who or what is securing (defensive actor) Predicate the action (to securitize, to secure, to defend) Direct Object (Referent) who or what has to be secured Prepositional Phrase with (means) Prepositional Phrase (threat) against (what threat) (cause) Prepositional Phrase in (where) Prepositional Phrase (when) Prepositional Phrase how

Grand Strategy Means (Aims/Ways) Means Aims Means Aims Ways Ways Ways

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define the aims; the subject, the predicate, and the instrumental prepositional phrase the means; while the other prepositional phrases specify the ways in which the aim should be achieved. The most important implications that should be drawn from the application of this model to the study of the concept of security are: a) the concept is constructed on a relationship: it is thus both a relational and relative notion; b) referent objects and subjects (the positions in the relationship) have to be clearly identified; and c) the predicates – the actions – depend both on the identity of the object and subject (agency) and on the context (structure and the prepositional phrases). It should be highlighted that this model applies to discourses of security and not insecurity. In discourses of insecurity, threats are usually the subjects (A threatens B), and all the other functions are inverted.

Language as Action: The Strategic Circuit of Policy Entrepreneurship Language is not only a structuring tool: on the one hand, it is a cognitive and normative structure through which ideas are uttered or formalized, and on the other, it can be seen as behavior, as a conscious action conducted by agents in order to institutionalize preferences and produce changes in the structure. After bracketing the first, this section will now discuss the components of language as behavior, and in particular, the implications of dominance for concepts and policies in the security domain. Scholars of communication theory applied to the social sciences, and especially of speech act analysis, claim that language does not merely describe, it does things. Language acquires a dynamic connotation that goes beyond the constraining/enabling movement: to say something is to do something (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). The problem of the application of this approach to policymaking – as some constructivists do (see later and Christiansen and Jorgensen and Wiener 2001) – is the delimitation of the borders of order: is language already part of the policy or only part of the process to arrive to policy? What is the relationship between security discourse (rhetoric) and security policy (practice)? Does language produce or constitute policy? In the following it will be argued that language produces policy and should be considered as a separate product in relation to policy outputs and outcomes: it is a system, which reflects ideas (through coordination and communication), and which structures and limits the policy options that policy-makers and their audiences find acceptable and legitimate. In contrast, Vivienne Schmidt and others (see argumentation theorists) distinguish between two functions of discourse in policy-making: a coordinative one through the provision of common language and framework, and a communicative one where discourse is intended as a means to persuade the audience of the necessity and appropriateness of the policy (Schmitt quoted in Howorth 2001: 783; Risse 2000). Discourse is not considered as a representation of preferences, but as a way to construct and influence assumptions and preferences by altering the perceptions

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of the issue (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004: 186). Policy is then not the expression of sedimented understanding as argued by Laclau and Mouffe 1985, but the result of a discourse which may or may not be linked to a cultural and normative context. As a consequence, the final text is the result of discursive practices (production, distribution, and consumption of ideas) rather than the mere translation of assumptions (Fairclough 1993: 73). This conceptualization however does not take into consideration the fact that there is a circular relationship between culture, discourse, and policy, according to which discourse does not exist independently from culture. The “Activity-Performativity-Connectivity” Model A text is a pragmatic product: it responds to or interacts with societal issues or problems on the basis of discursive practices and it may produce policy actions (Fairclough 1992: 73; Gill and Whedbee 1997: 161). In particular political discourse may be seen as: the verbal equivalent of political action: the set of all political verbalization, and expressible forms adopted by political organizations and political individuals. It generates response which may range from indifference, through hostility, to enthusiasm and which may or may not lead to political action. It is as complex in its interrelations as political action is. The significance of any instance of political discourse will be affected by its overall relation to political action. And together discourse and action constitute political practice (Gaffney 1999: 200).

Accordingly, discourse is itself an action or is a facilitator for further actions. Once again, the role of context is essential: discursive practices are dialectically related to the specific fields of action in which they are embedded, that is, the situational, institutional, and social settings shape discourses (intended as text, speaker, and audience), and discourses influence social and political processes and actions. This circular and reflexive exercise continuously moulds and reshapes the relationship between concept, discourse, and action. In the model of discourse as a strategic resource for political action, discourse is intended as the means through which a cognitive representation is channeled and filtered in order to reach a goal, in this case, a policy outcome. The mechanism is built upon the interconnection of three circuits, which activate the discursive syntax mentioned above and explain how speakers/writers (the subjects of the action), audience (the object) and context intermingle and contribute to the transfer of a concept into policy practice (Hardy and Palmer 1998). Activity, performativity, and connectivity are essential steps for the success of discourse as a strategic resource. In the activity field, individuals attempt to introduce new discursive statements that will connect objects to particular concepts. Using symbols, stories, and metaphors (discourse as structure) – the pure rhetorical aspect of the action – the speaker tries to draw attention and to

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establish a link between an idea and his/her audience. The performativity circle highlights the importance of sociality for the success of a discourse. Unless it is grounded in time and space – anchored to common linguistic, cultural, and ideological predispositions (or manipulation) – and it is understood and received by other relevant actors, discursive activity will remain simply what it is: words and talks. Finally, through connectivity, concepts do not only resonate in the public, but they are acknowledged as pertinent and compatible with the receivers’ belief system: discourse becomes in this way sedimented into taken-for-granted practice and rhetoric, so that discursive moves facilitate mobilization and the consideration of the issue as an item of the policy agenda, thus transforming a preference into a choice (Kingdon 1995: 3). As a matter of fact, a policy process is made of three steps: problem recognition and agenda setting; alternatives and policy proposals; and politics and choices made (Burstein 1991: 331). The circularity of the model is representative of the interplay between broad societal discourse, specific discursive acts, and consequential practices, and it explains how these elements taken together contribute to the formation of policy through innovation, selection, and diffusion. Innovation refers to the introduction of new symbols and meanings for the redefinition of the issue; selection determines which intersubjective meanings are chosen and validated on the basis of their receptivity; and diffusion indicates how these selected symbols go to influence new cognitive structures (Adler 1991: 55–60; Bernstein 2000: 482). Culture and identity intervene at all levels of analysis (choice of words, symbols, time, frame etc.), but they are particularly powerful in the receptivity circuit when a certain assumption made by the speaker, if validated, acquires ideological solidity. Discourse is thus translating “the world in their minds” – assumptions based on the personal history and cultural background of the speaker (Vertzberger 1990: 319) – into socially accepted worldviews (Doty 1993: 305). The success of the discourse is related to the existence of certain background meanings (structures) which are raised to dominance (Doty 1993: 228). The speaker does not have control of the final outcome, and this is what makes discourse a social interactive practice, which is not only emanating from ideas in people’s heads, but which is “firmly rooted in and oriented to real, material social structures” (Fairclough 1992: 66): the speaker has to consider the whole range of independent variables (the contexts) that may influence the success of his/her discourse. In a discussion of discourse and action, as in ideology, power or the speaker’s position plays an important role for performativity. By the same token, discourse hegemony or dominance, once one full round of the activity-performativityconnectivity circuits is successfully completed, strongly influences practice and policy outcome. As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses limit the range of policy options, thereby functioning as precursors to policy outcomes…The supreme power is the power to delineate the boundaries of thought – an attribute

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Through internalization and institutionalization on the one hand, and through the reification in policy practices on the other, the dominant discourse becomes crystallized, and it is subsumed and incorporated into the cultural assumptions and preferences so that this circuit model is not as dynamic as it might appear at first sight. Even in the case of an abrupt revolutionary change in external conditions (like 9/11 for example), at the beginning the old dominant discourse generally goes to supplement and not completely substitute the new emerging one: the old discourse is modified in order to integrate the new one. Coherence in discourse despite an important change might suggest the existence of thick culture (Geertz 1973). As it will be discussed later, the use of traditional state symbols (territorial frontiers, integrity) when talking about national security maintains its strength despite the supposed change in the discourse of what a state is or should be: as a consequence, national security policies adapt only slowly not only to change in reality per se (the emergence or dissolution of actors for instance) but also to new discursive statements that pretend to represent and interpret material changes (Larsen 2000b). A dominant discourse is an indicator of a tendency or attitudes and does not determine a policy output or outcome. However, in general, it could be said that attitudes and behavior tend towards consistency (Haas 1964: 112). It should be stressed that dominance is not so much a quantitative or qualitative measure, but it is the product of receptivity and connectivity. For the sake of our argument then, the acceptance of a coherent dominant grand strategy at the declaratory and discursive level indicates the existence of a common language, common understanding, and at the very top common strategic culture. This does not mean that the actors do not engage in persuasion, argumentation, negotiation, coercion, manipulation, silencing or socialization through discourse (Risse 2000; on silence see Jaworski 1997). It is not the scope of this research to digress on these social tactics of dominance or consensus-formation. The lesson to be drawn in our context is that a grand strategy, intended as a dominant discourse, is an indication of the dominant strategic culture of the elites participating in the process. The purpose of using symbols and language may not be only for the sake of policy-making per se. Johnston (AI 1995b: 156–161) mentions in particular three different purposes: a) a self-directed (among the elites) in the form of “auto-communication” designed to construct or reinforce the internal sense of identity and legitimacy, whereby implementation into policy is seen as secondary (�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� declaratory strategic policy not necessarily coincident with action policy); b) directed to the non-elites inside the organization in order to reinforce the internal legitimacy and credibility of the authority and its power structures; and c) directed to the outside of the organization in order to create a sense of in group solidarity embedded into a rhetorical and political community (external-internal dichotomy) (see also Charaudeau 2002: 314–315). This means that even if dominant discourse

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is not operationalized into policy outputs (Milliken 1999: 240), the activityperformativity-receptivity model is still valid to explain the existence of cultural attitudes and the success of other processes like identity and actorness construction and strengthening. A Macro Theory of Discursive Action Figure 3.���������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 shows the role of discursive action in the relationship between the material and “objective” state of affairs and policy action. This simplified model sketches the explanatory framework underlying the theoretical assumptions discussed until now. The subject of the policy-making circuit is constituted by the elites who, officially or unofficially, contribute to the formation of the policy. These elites perceive and interpret reality, internal or external to their group or institution, through individual and social cognitive processes. Culture intervenes in the form of a lens that translates and organizes the information received. These beliefs influence then the choice of a determinate discursive action or grand strategy by limiting or enlarging the preferences and options available. By the same token, the deriving strategy directs and constrains the resulting action. In practice, the elites take notice of the international and domestic situation: the news of a conflict, its economic impact, the causes and the respective positioning of other actors. The “reality” facts are perceived and interpreted thanks to pre-existing cognitive maps. These cognitive maps are a result of experience, previous knowledge, learning and

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cultural paradigms (individual or social): they are organized and communicated through language and discourse and they end up in a grand strategy text. What is important to underline at this point is that interests and ideas may be part of the cultural assumptions that steer the attitudes towards policy. Although there exist different conceptualizations and uses of “discourse”, its relevance as an analytical instrument in this framework is not only to be conducted to the structuring function it fulfils in the “context of the situation” (direct relationship discourse → action): the study of language allows to draw implications concerning the “context of culture” as well (inverse relationship culture ← discourse), thus offering a solution to the epistemological problem of apprehending culture (see Chapter 2). The Speakers or Idea-Entrepreneurs and the Audience Before discussing how this model applies to the security domain, it is important to digress on the central role of the speakers or idea-entrepreneurs and their relationship with the audience, because discourse is essentially a social interactive process (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004: 195) and the success of a dominant discourse depends not only on the identity and the role of the agents performing the act but also on the receivers. In general, it is possible to distinguish between different types of agents who take part in the discourse. On the production side, there may be a) a public animator or the person who makes the sounds; the author or the person who selected the words and the phrasing (also ghost writer); and the principal or the person who is responsible for the opinions expressed. For simplicity, the figures of animator, author, and principal will be integrated under the label of “speaker”. On the receiving side, the categories are: a) the primary addressee (a ratified hearer); and b) the overhearer (a non-ratified hearer, for instance, an accidental bystander) (Goffman 1981: 325–326). The identification of the speakers and the audience is important because it may suggest the purpose of the discourse: whether it is policy oriented, or whether it has “simply” legitimating functions (Johnstone 2002). As a matter of fact, leaders or elites (individuals or institutions) can be defined as strategic “users of culture” who redefine the descriptive and prescriptive limits of possible by using language for a determinate political agenda (Swindler 1986; Cameron D. 1994: 23, 29): speakers may be considered as “idea-entrepreneurs” who have the power given by their particular authoritative role and position (Le Pestre 1997: 4) to strategically choose and code cognitive categories and references and use rhetorical means in the communication of their perceptions, and thus to predispose (some would say: manipulate) the audience to desired conclusions and fabricate or encourage expectations (Payne 2001). In fact, speakers usually design their speech style on the basis of whom they are addressing. For what concerns the security domain, the speakers are restricted elites of decision-makers and “specialists”, and the coordination among these agents

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usually happens behind close doors. Given the nature of this policy area, the primary addressees of security discourses are generally other elites, either internal or external, while the overhearer is the general public. By elites are intended both political (from other domains or other levels) and academic elites, who are deemed to share a common cognitive context (Oren 2000: 556). Even in democracies, public opinion has a limited effect on the scope and timing of security policy because of the fact that it can be manipulated very easily (Lantis 2002a: 109) especially if it is moderately aware, what is generally the case in situations of insecurity (Zaller 1992: 7). Since resonance and connectivity are essential components for the success of the discourse, it is not surprising that the main interlocutors of security utterances are so-called discursive or epistemic communities (Goldstein and Keohane 1993: 11). An epistemic community is the aggregate of “knowledge-based experts who share both cause-effect conceptions and sets of normative and principled beliefs” (Haas PM 1992: 3; Adler and Haas 1992), who may tend to form a discursive community because they use the same linguistic code or jargon, frames of reference, and social space and history, which altogether affect how they perceive the world and their attitudes towards determinate courses of action and preferences (Kramsch 1998: 6–10; Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). The vocabulary and the syntactical structures used are indicators of the membership in one or the other social group. Particularly striking in this context is the different and sometimes interchangeable roles of the members of the same epistemic/discursive community: security scholars and practitioners, because of similar educational background, share the same jargon which may be used both in theoretical and political discourses (for instance the ghost-writer of Mr. Patten as well as the Director of CFSP at the EU Commission combine the two roles) (see for instance Erikkson 1999a). In a relatively small and closed community of practitioners and scholars, these elites are thus the primary bearers, users, and purveyors of strategic and security discourses and policies, and consequently of strategic culture (Lantis 2002: 106). Their role as audience is an active one: when for instance the U.S. Secretary of State listens to what the German Foreign Minister is saying, the response is not limited to a passive acceptance or refusal of the terms of discourse: both speaker and audience possess the necessary knowledge, legitimacy, and capacity of immediate reaction, what is lacking to the general public or overhearer. Hence, the activity-receptivity circuits may acquire a dynamics of their own because of continuous negotiations between different concept-entrepreneurs: connectivity and the relative crystallization into a policy practice is possible then only when agreement is reached, independently of the method applied (persuasion or coercion) at the level of the epistemic community of reference. In particular, for the scope of this analysis, an accent on activity is interesting because it sheds light on the relationship between culture and ideology on the one side and language and policy on the other, and it allows for the identification of the source of determinate concepts (where they come from) and the rationale of a specific policy agenda. The figure of idea/discourse/policy entrepreneurs broadly

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used by social constructivist scholars is therefore attractive because it incorporates elements of cognitive psychology (both at the individual and organizational level), anthropology, and economics in decision-making studies. Through the analysis of discursive activity it is thus possible to advance hypotheses and draw inferences about the philosophical and instrumental “operational codes” of the speakers, that is, the particular concepts of politics and values, and the beliefs about options for viable actions, which influence the image of the external world that they have in their minds and consequently, the actions that they undertake (Chilton 1996a: 27). The belief system, mental maps and determinate causal assertions – the political and strategic culture – constrain and enable the introduction of particular discursive statements, the condition sine qua non for a strategic circle to start. The fact that an organization may be identified with what its representatives say or do is a commonsense: by the same token, in a closed community of “specialists”, their utterances are the only ones that “count” in the discourse-action process. In the case of the European Union it thus makes sense to suppose that the discursive practices of its representatives, if not contested, are taken by the other participants in the system (that is, external and internal security actors) as the legitimate and authoritative embodiment of a broader “institutional” political and strategic culture. The Security Discourse Dynamics: From Securitization to Defense The utility of the model of language as action or as a resource for action in the field of security has been articulated by radical social constructivism and in particular by the Copenhagen School: security is understood as the product of a set of discourses and practices built upon institutionally shared meanings rather than an objective and exogenous state of affairs. A central role is played by agency who engages in “securitization” (see also desecuritization or asecuratization), that is, an act of definition (or speech act) which transforms an issue from nonpoliticized to politicized to securitized (Huysmans 1996: 127; Buzan et al. 1998: 23): in fact “securitization studies aim to gain an increasingly precise understanding of who securitizes, on what issues (threats), for whom (referent objects), why, with what results, and, not least, under what conditions” (Buzan et al. 1998: 32), in order to emphasize the subjective and intersubjective nature of security. The labelling of an issue as a “threat” by the elites is not only a rhetorical practice, but it has deep cognitive implications since it suggests a way to categorize information and consequently act upon them: the conceptual classification and framing shapes competence delimitation and the set of rules which should be applied to the specific case (means and ways) (Waever 1995a). Despite recognizing that securitization – the linguistic transformation of an issue into an urgent and extraordinary security threat – may be considered successful only if the performance or the utterance is accepted by the audience (Buzan et al. 1998: 25) and it is included in the policy agenda (Eriksson 1999b), the Copenhagen School and its acolytes have mainly focused on the micro-level

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of securitization as a speech act or the “innovation effect” in the activity circuit of the model presented here. The ������������������������������������������������������� mere enunciation of a problem as a security threat is however not sufficient for a successful securitization or the establishment of a dominant security discourse. ������������������������������������������������� Figure 3.2 shows the application of the activityperformativity-connectivity model to securitization. In the activity circle, the speaker utters a statement in the name of the referent object or of the subject (or both when they are coincident) and denounces problems as security threats (existentiality): he/she introduces new stories and symbols about the danger and identifies the threat by associating the object with existing cognitive structures. In order to do that, in the performativity circle, security is periodized and contextualized using references to specific events (ex. Balkan wars, September 11, numbers of deaths, destruction). If the stories make sense to the audience on the basis of their existing cultural framework, then the discursive statements “take”, connecting object and concept in a specific frame, and enable the creation of new institutions and organs or new tasks for existing institutions for the implementation of the discourse-action connection. As it will be shown in the next chapter, if security is successfully connected to peacekeeping and crisis management rather than traditional territorial defense, this means that new subject positions and practices emerge. This in turn leads to a re-conceptualization of security in terms of the new ideas encapsulated in the practice. The success of

Figure 3.2

Securitization or Security Discourse as Strategic Resource for Action

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securitization thus depends on the receptivity of the audience; on the situational, cognitive, and cultural contexts; and on the authority and performative power of the speakers (see also Balzacq 2005). In conclusion, to consider grand strategy or whatever major political document as a dominant discourse or as a text where the observer can “read” or “interpret” the assumptions, the attitudes, the preferences and the expectations of the elites may be necessary but not sufficient for inferring cultural generalizations on the one hand and predicting behavior on the other. The contexts play a pivotal role in the determination of the syntax and semantics of security as well as social and political relations.

Chapter 4

Analyzing Security Discourses and Practices: A Typology

It is common to read in accounts of the state of security studies and practice that a paradigmatic shift has occurred, that is, that new security thinking has become the dominant cognitive framework in the field (Baehr 2003; see Chapter 2). Is this really true? Are these simply cognitive responses to a variable strategic environment, or do they represent normative attempts to put new ideals into practice? The “essentialist” discussion in the previous chapter aimed at delineating an abstract and general methodology for considering how the concept is constructed and works at the epistemological level. Although security is a common word in human language and it can be applied in a variety of different contexts, what is of interest in this research is its use and concretization in institutional discourses initiated and developed by International Relations’ scholars and policy-makers (Chilton 1996a: 23). Its ontological color and characterization is dependent on the specific articulation of a complex network of interlinked key-concepts which constitute the fundamental terms of reference and the pivotal repertoire of the discipline: state, power, and sovereignty (Linklater 2000). Security is then not only a philosophical state or a theoretical abstraction: it becomes a tool that defines the “political”, sets priorities and justifies the use of “extraordinary means”, or in plain language, the use of force. The way security is understood and formulated in a political discourse profoundly affects the way political life is conducted. By applying the framework of analysis elaborated above, the aim of this chapter is to systematically break down the narratives employed by both the academia and the practitioners’ circles in the contemporary debate about the meaning of security. The ontological, “semantic”, or symbolic qualification of the syntactical elements of the discourse – referent objects, subjects, predicates and so on – as states, individuals, peace and stability for instance, influences, constrains, and enables the relative formulation of determinate security and defense policies. For heuristic purposes, the dominant discourses will be simplified and categorized in an idealtypology. The location of the period (context or structure) and the identity of the “speakers” (agency) play a significant function for the success of the discourse in terms of dominance and connectivity. A survey of the wider theoretical background of the controversy is thus of paramount importance in order to situate the debate and understand the origin, path, and endpoint of different security logics. The analysis in particular individuates two ideal-typical discourses, associated to different paradigms, assumptions, preferences, and behavior and reflecting a particular interpretation of the international system. For analytical simplification

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and generalization, these discourses are labelled “Traditional (Westphalian)” and “Human”, and a via media is individuated in the form of “Traditional Plus” security (see also Kaul 1995; Moeller 2000a; Bain 2001). The main function of ideal-types is to offer benchmarks to study a trend and organize expectations. By searching for dominance in examples of discourses, the aim is to try to understand whether there is generally consistency between discourse and behavior, and if so, what cultural implications may be inferred. This does not mean that a multiplicity of alternative and concurrent discourses does not exist. Dominance is judged on the basis of the authority and performativity of the speakers (number of speakers and quality) as well as the spread and the importance of the texts produced in the policy-making hierarchy (which assumes acceptance by an epistemic community); their solidification for a certain amount of time; and the eventual implementation in policy. The case studies mentioned here are only used as examples: they have been filtered from existing studies and sources, and they should in no sense be considered original empirical material. The major assumptions advanced in this section frame the structure of the following analysis of the ESDP discourse and practice. First, there is a strong correspondence between scholar and political discourses: they aliment each other in a fluid way, whereby the one discourse is co-opted into the other either as objective evidence or as political justification. It is thus possible to classify both academic schools of thought or paradigms and individual or organizational practices according to the same grammatical and syntactical grid. Although it is normal and scientifically sound that studies and analyses should refer to the socalled “hard facts” of reality and actually build their postulates upon them, the inverse phenomenon seeing the political actors orienting their discursive behavior on the line of “theoretical constructs” mystifies the traditional objectivity claim. If the documents – official and non – issued by political actors and considered as facts by students of international relations and international law are actually the boomerang result of ideas and beliefs formulated and expressed by those very same scholars – through the channels of formal education, information and knowledge creation and distribution as well as persuasion and social learning among members of the same epistemic community – the distinction between observer and observed ceases to be clear and meaningful. Consequently, when the “theory” informs the “practice”, or better, when the theory offers the common language and the interpretation instruments to the practice, the borders of order of these two distinct epistemological levels become confused and artificial. Without engaging in foundationalist research – that is, without going back to the detailed history of IR discourses, trying to establish who was the entrepreneur of a prevailing security conceptualisation and to draw its successive evolution – it is possible to identify, with the help of the discursive syntax model, determinate trends of dominance which overlap and transgress contexts and sector of reference. This means that the two ideal-types of security discourses, the “Westphalian” and the “human”, correspond respectively to a realist/rationalist paradigm and a state practice on

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the one side and to a post-modern/reflectivist approach and a non-state practice on the other. Second, security discourses are not only important at the declamatory or rhetorical level. They constitute the frame of meaning of the policies that directly follow from them. Policies are here intended as practices or sets of instruments designed to materialize a concept and directly linked to their field of discursive action. Observing a Westphalian discourse, it is legitimate to expect a correspondent type of policy measures including but not limited to the use of military force. The same is true in reversal for the human counterpart. Again, this categorization highlights a tendency, not an absolute and exclusive division of labor. Independently of reasons of material capabilities and supremacy, which maintain their causal explanatory power, the fact that a state decides to make of the military the central means of its security apparatus implies a determinate image and perception of the international system which, in turn, is reflected in the articulation of the dominant security discourse. In this sense for instance the term “peacemaking”, a general label for a specific type of security mission, assumes a different connotation depending on how the syntax is applied, whether the referent object is the local civilian population, the receiving state or the donor state; whether at stake is global peace in the name of universal human rights or local stability in the interest of a particular subject. Accordingly, the use of the military in peacemaking, its acceptance and legitimation, is qualified by the discourse in which it is inserted and, as a corollary, by the strategic culture that informs this discourse. Finally, the application of the model to academic and practical security discourses brings to the fore hypotheses concerning the identity of the speakers/subjects and the receptivity of the audience, that is, their ideological and cultural “lifeworld”. The typologies proposed are developed as analytical testing ground against which the EU’s discourses will be then assessed. The use of a thin comparative methodology, and the fact that the EU fits the model proposed, suggests that the EU discourse follows – willingly or forcefully – certain mainstream syntactical and semantical rules essential for communication with other actors, and that from a discursive perspective (and consequently from the policy point of view too) the EU cannot be considered as a sui generis entity in international security affairs.

The Academia-Practice Connection For social constructivists like Alexander Wendt (1992) security is what states/ people make of it. Security is also what theorists or analysts make of it. As a matter of fact, in the discipline and field of security, analysts and commentators play a particularly intrusive political role. Theories play the function of cognitive frameworks for the organization of perceptions and expectations, and moral, ideological, and normative elements influence the description of security (Huysmans 1998b; Buzan et al. 1998: 8).

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Despite the gap acknowledged by some between academic scholarship and policy concerns (Finel 1998: 11–12), and the recognition that policy has usually “enriched academic research more than the reverse” (Betts 1997: 32) (while policymakers frequently dismiss the academia as too abstract and irrelevant for the real world because unaccountable, Jentelson 2002), theory tends to inform discourses and practices of politicians and decision-makers, who consciously or unconsciously and implicitly or explicitly use theoretical organizing principles, assumptions, and expectations about what forces shape the international environment and add a distinct “bureaucratic flavor” to the academic discourses (Keohane 1986: 4; Walt 1998: 29; Fischer 1997: 15–17; Wing 2000). The theory is providing not only the tools of analysis but more importantly the language used to describe a security phenomenon. Language is here intended as the jargon or the technical code in use in order to give meaning to things: Wolfers’ reference to security as a label with “an attractive and possibly deceiving name” which “may not mean the same thing to different people” (Wolfers 1962: 147) suggests that behind the use of a common term the “real” significance is linked to the specific theoretical apparatus of reference. Security analysts set the borders of orders for discussions of security (Erikkson 1999a; Behnke 2000b), whereby “knowledge produced in the academy is fused with that of policy-makers to make up a ‘dominant intellectual/policy perspective’” (George J. 1994: 34) in which the two parties, in some cases indistinguishable because they assume interchangeable roles, cooperate to create a dominant common sense (Milliken 1999: 238). Epistemologically but also ethically problematic, this creates a mutual recursive relationship between the academia and policy practitioners who often “rub shoulders and blur the boundary line” (Dalby 1997: 10): policies are used as evidence in the legitimation of the theories, while theories are used as tools for the legitimation of the policies (on this last point see Booth 1997: 87; Radaelli 1999: 759–760). Since the origin of the foreign and security policy-makers’ worldviews is in the academia because of their formal training in universities (or the training of their advisors and consultants), they can easily understand their logic of appropriateness attached to the paradigms and at will exploit the models developed at the theoretical level and then pick and choose or adapt them to the contingencies of actual policy practice (Mowle 2003: 563; Tetlock 1993: 323–326; George AL 1993). As already pointed out in the discussion about speakers and audience in the previous chapter, security “experts” and “intellectuals” – the first ones considered to be more rationalists and oriented to problem solving, while the second ones are deemed to be more critical and reflectivist (Waever and Buzan 2007: 393) – go to form an epistemic and discursive community, which, despite the fact that it contains different interests because it is constituted by different actors, tends to use knowledge in order to frame common objectives and strategies especially in situations of radical insecurity or uncertainty (Haas P. 1992: 3). From being simply a loosely connected policy network of professionals, scholars, officials, politicians whose meetings are defined by distinct rules and organizational imperative but with only consultative functions (Marsch and Smith 2000: 5), experts and intellectuals

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may reach positions of “bureaucratic power” through the institutionalization of their role in “advisory committees” that have preferential access to the decisionmakers and may facilitate their learning (Levy 1994) (see in particular the EU case in Chapter 5). Hence, policy innovation, diffusion, selection, persistence, and evolution are directly facilitated by this interrelationship and by the fact that this community is not only the “speaker” but also acts as one of the audience legitimating performativity, so that the policy-makers are in reality not only the officials but the whole specialized community altogether (for policy stages see Adler and Haas 1992: 375–387). Interesting in the context of this book is the so-called “ethnocentricity” of security discourses (Booth 1979; Acharya 2000) which pertains to both experts and intellectuals on the one side, and decision-makers on the other. In particular, the purported difference between Europe and the US in terms of academic and policy products is reconducted to a difference in worldviews and culturalinstitutional contexts, whereby the American hegemony in IR and strategic studies is often attributed as a reflection of the US power in the international system (Jorgensen 2000; Waever 1998a; Smith S. 1993; Klein BS 1988; see the discussion on actorness and identity in Chapter 6 and 7). In addition, Waever and Buzan (2007: 393) argue that the US and European arenas of theoretical discussion have developed a different form of knowledge because of a different conception of the relationship of the academia to policy. In the US, academia and policy are clearly separated: while universities are responsible for theory development, policy analysis is generally conducted in think-tanks, which tend to draw upon theory to popularize and simplify academic constructs for decision-makers and whose major objective is to influence policy (Parmar 2004). In Europe, because of the structure of the intellectual market, this distinction between academia and policyanalysis is less straightforward and people tend to move between these categories. As it will be shown in the discussion of the contexts of the ESDP discourse, the fact that some EU decision-makers often engage in scholarly discussions, while academics are called upon to advise and draft policy papers seems to confirm this hypothesis at least for what concerns the European case. Apart from these transatlantic differences in dominant approaches, the real problem for the security “epistemic community” is that, although it is struggling to remain a delimited and closed professional clan as it is the case for the military strategic sector, the various broadening and deepening movements described in Chapter 2 are jeopardizing the clear borders of this once exclusive club. This means that the shift from monopoly to a free market of ideas enshrined in an amazing amount of publications on anything from atoms and germs to space technology passing through philosophy and ethics transforms the “expert” or “specialist” in an “all-knower”, or somebody who pretends to have an answer for the whole variety of security problems. If on the one hand this reflects the increasing complexity of security issues, on the other, the risk is that the decision-makers are exposed to such a cacophony of divergent voices that it makes their task – of taking a decision and standing for it in a limited period of time (given the institutional length of office) – a particularly

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challenging one. The fact that a dominant approach towards human security for instance emerges in the epistemic community may not be reflected in the priorities individuated by their constituencies, and this decollage between theory and reality could explain inconsistencies between discourse and practice.

The Traditional “Westphalian” Discourse Associated to classical realism and neo-realism, the so-called traditional “Westphalian” security discourse ideal-type is qualified by concerns about national security, whereby state, sovereignty, and territorial integrity (indivisibility) play a crucial role. The state is seen as a rational actor the goal of which is to maximize national interest intended as survival and power accumulation in an anarchical world. It is denoted as “traditional” because it refers to an historicallybased model grounded on sovereignty norms which were instituted at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (the Treaty of Münster and the Treaty of Osnabrück): the principles of sovereignty and equality between states as well as the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states (Krasner 1999: 20; Osiander 2001). Necessary condition for state sovereignty in both international and internal affairs is the effective monopoly on the use or licensing of violence within a given territory, which should insure both independence from external threats and internal control (Weber cited in Osiander 2001: 255). At the international level order is thus maintained by the diffusion and equilibrium of power. Also termed “conservative”, a dominance in this type of discouse tends to result in forms of Realpolitik: power and in particular coercion are essential instruments in the definition of a security strategy. What Texts? Case Studies The following discussion should be considered as preliminary and a rough simplification of how the security syntax could be applied for the analysis of security discourses. Because of space constraints and because the subject is huge, it is impossible here to present in depth specific case-studies displaying a dominance of the traditional discourse. Instead, trends and tendencies will be hinted at. It should be noted that in practice ideal-types do not necessarily exist, but they represent only benchmarks according to which it makes sense to analyze and compare case-studies. The texts that are relevant in this regard are official documents and speeches, letters (particularly interesting are the letters in the Foreign offices), memories from leaders, memoranda, and military doctrines and commentaries. Since this discourse is historically bound, it requires archival research (see for instance Paret 1986). One important caveat to this type of analysis is the fact that discourse has been already interpreted through behavior in historical accounts, and this might distort interpretation.

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In general, a dominant Westphalian discourse is to be found in texts stemming from the period after 1648 until now. In particular, research has focused on balance of power and the Great Powers (France, Great Britain, and Prussian Germany) in the 19th century, causes of war in the 20th century, and the Cold War. Interestingly, the study of a dominant discourse requires to open the blackbox of the state and to analyze the internal political dynamics in order to understand why a particular type of dominance has emerged at all. Contemporary examples are to be found for instance in the US National Security Strategy 2002, the grand strategies of the Arab states, China and South-Eastern Asia, Latin America and in neo-conservative circles both in the US and in Europe (Kagan 2001; Ikenberry 2004). Interestingly, international law (and in particular the law of war) is the codification of the Westphalian discourse and order. Contexts The contexts obviously vary depending on the specific case-study: they are unique and cannot be generalized. However, common features exist that explain the emergence of this particular discourse. The situational context refers to the geopolitical condition of the time under consideration. It should be noted that this discourse appears to be dominant when situations of conflict are the norms rather than the exception. It is not surprising to find this discourse when states perceive themselves under threat for what concerns one or several of their existential values (territory, government, people, or recognition). The cultural context reflects the ideas pervasive in the ruling elites. With experience, education is an important factor in the formation and perpetuation of assumptions and normative predispositions. For example, the study and absorption of Hobbes and Clausewitz does enable and constrain a particular view of the world, which does not only contain a pessimist philosophical approach to human nature, but it also sees war as inevitable and actually necessary to maintain the balance of power (Jervis 1978; Van Creveld 1991). Despite research on the influence of democratic political culture in international relations (Maoz and Russett 1989), this does not seem to influence strategic postures. Linked to the cultural context is the cognitive context: again, similar types of education based on “realist” texts contribute to the perseverance of a structural organization of information centered on rationalist assumptions about state behavior. The co-text refers for instance to national constitutions but also to historical accounts and other products of intellectuals of the time, who might have been part of the policy or epistemic community. Finally, speakers in this idealtype are exclusively state-leaders, while the audience depends on the particular political system: in general however, the major addressees are other states. The Discursive Syntax and Semantics In a traditional security discourse, the state is the only referent object or unit of reference. In general, there are no sub-levels. “National security must be defined

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as integrity of the national territory and its institutions” (Morgenthau 1960: 563). Nation and state are seen as coterminous (the existence of nation-states is a cultural assumption): Morgenthau in 1971 writes of the “the survival of a political unit in its identity” (Morgenthau 1971: 219) rather than a state or a nation, but it is clear what he refers to. The state is seen as the expression of the identity of the collectivity. The referent object is thus qualified in terms of values: national interests and values, and above everything stability (status quo, balance, and equilibrium). Territory and natural resources represent the most important values for physical survival and they are also seen as crucial indicators of power. This explains the insistence on geographical borders and concerns about geographical distribution of power. Sovereignty and the independence of domestic political institutions is also a possible object of security. It is important to highlight that the reduction to security as state survival is a consequence of the fact that it is assumed that there exists homogeneity of interests between the state or the political community and its citizens: this implies that citizens or individuals per se are not referent objects, but they are subsumed in an anthropomorphic concept of the state or the geo-political community (Reus-Smith 1992). In such a discourse, possession goals characterize the national interest, since competition in the international arena is seen as a zero-sum game (Wolfers 1966: 73). Threats are generally not only located in other states (see fear of attack and aggression), but also internally in the form of intergovernmental or antigovernmental violence�������������������������������������������������������������������������� (Huntington 1962). What is important here is that there is a tendency to clearly individuate the source of the threats in terms of enemies or adversaries (see for instance the need to identify a state supporting terrorism in order to react to 9/11). Since the monopoly of the use of force rests with the sovereign, the subject of security is exclusively the state either as independent actor or as a member of an alliance system. In particular, the government and the army play a pivotal role in the provision of both internal and external security. Defense is the dominant predicate. The means include diplomacy but are centered on the threat or use of force in its different formats: ����������������������� defensive (to fend off attacks and/or reduce damage of an attack), deterrent (prevention), compellent (get adversary to do or stop doing something) or swaggering (to enhance prestige) (Art 1989). Offensive uses of force or of war as the legitimate continuation of foreign policy are also included in the means of a traditional security strategy. The military instrument is seen as prioritarian because war is considered as “the ultima ratio of power in international relations” (Carr EH 1966:109). This explains and justifies the subsequent prepositional phrases: military means are given preference as well as deterrence and coercion. The location of the security action is generally specified in geopolitical terms, and the sovereignty of another state does not constitute an obstacle when the aim is the elimination of an existential threat situated on its territory (in disrespect of the principle of non-interference). The internal and external dimensions are clearly demarcated. Time is also a sensitive variable: when should the security action take place? Before or after an attack? Self-defense as per

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art. 51 UN Charter has to be necessary, proportional, and instantaneous after the attack. As it is the case for the definition of aggression however, this delimitation is controversial. In general thus, depending on the defensive or offensive postures (indicating reaction or proaction), time references are short-termed in the sense that action is mobilitated either just before the attack is struck or just afterwards. The debate is linked to the preventive or pre-emptive use of force (Mueller KP 2006). This extract of the US National Security Strategy can be seen as an example of the application of the syntactical analysis: We will disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations by: (…) defending the United States, the American people, and our interests at home and abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders. While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country (US NSS 2002: 6).

Here the referent objects are the United States (state), the American people, and interests; the subject is the United States; the threat is terrorism; the predicate is to destroy, to defend, to prevent; the means are unspecified but suggested by the verb “to destroy” (force); the location is both at home and abroad; the way does not exclude unilateralism; and finally the time includes action both before and after the attack (not only reaction but pro-action). Implications for Policy and Behavior A dominant traditional security discourse justifies policies and behavior, in which deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and the use of force have priority. This translates into defense spending for the military and armaments (including an interest for the WMD disarmament) and a preference for enforcement missions and combat operations (see later in the chapter Binnendijk 2002).

The Human Security Discourse The alternative and concurrent security discourse is centered on “human security”. It should be noted that this discourse is not necessarily subsequent or new in relation to the Westphalian discourse: it has been only recently considered “new” because in the past the dominance of the traditional discourse was so widespread and uncontested that competitive discourses were either not taken seriously or simply “silenced” in certain policy and intellectual circles. Associated to critical approaches to security, the central hypothesis in this discourse is that international politics is superseded by “domestic politics of a global scale” (Lugo 1996; Lyons

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and Mastanduno 1995): the very state system is negated while the existence of a pre-ordinate higher authority reified. The human security discourse does not only imply an enlargement of the dimensions of security, but it assumes a different conceptualization in terms of level of analysis and structure of the system. Human rights rather than state sovereignty are the leading principles, and security is not seen in terms of exclusionary physical state power but more in terms of the absence of structural violence intended as “indirect violence done to individuals when unjust economic and political structures reduce their life expectancy through lack of access to basic material needs” (Tickner 1994: 187). Geographical borders thus lose their meaning, and society rather than the state becomes the most important term of reference for an “all-inclusive all-pervasive” concept of security (Blatz 1966: 112–116), where the final aim is the achievement of “positive peace” and the elimination of structural violence both in the domestic and the international settings (Stephenson 1992; Galtung 1998; King and Murray 2002). What Texts? “Case Studies” It is much easier to identify the basic texts through which this discourse is performed. The human security discourse dates back to the 1970s (or the period of détente during the Cold War), when the Helsinki agreements at the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) introduced the idea of “comprehensive security” to highlight the fact that security does not only include military issues, but that it is the product of political, economic, societal, environmental, and communal factors. In the 1980s, independent commissions chaired by Willy Brandt and Olaf Palme respectively also stressed how “common security” is indivisible and involves issues of economic justice, while the 1995 UN Commission on Global governance refers to “global security” as including the security of the people and of the planet (see Bajpai 2000; Dalby 2000; Hampson and Daudlin 2001). The 1990 Paris Charter of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) talks of giving “a human face to security”, that is, to move towards “a civilianisation of security” (quoted in Lodge 1993: 233–234). After the Cold War, the term “human security” is coined for the first time in the 1994 Human Development Report (HDR) produced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and used in a variety of contexts by both international organizations like the UN (see the final report of the UN Commission on Human Security, published in May of 2003, “Human Security Now”) or states like Canada. In this respect, two schools of thought or discourse can be distinguished: one based on the UN including a large conceptualization of human security to encompass development issues, and a more state-centric one based on the Canadian approach that separates security from development and is centered on the elimination of violent threats against the individual.

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Contexts The situational context for the emergence of this discourse is the end of the Cold War, despite the fact that signs of the increasing relevance of non-military issues go back to the 70s. The international environment is mostly dominated by intra-state conflicts, which leads to question the essentials of sovereignty and the prohibition of intervention in the internal affairs of a state for the sake of conflict prevention and management. Moreover, globalization seems to pose challenges which go beyond military survival. The major speakers of this discourse are on the one hand International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) like the United Nations (Secretary General and General Assembly in particular) with several of its agencies (UNDP, UNHCR for instance), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the World Bank; and on the other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like the Society for International Development, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and others related to development and human rights (Bajpai 2000; Baehr 2003: 12). It should be noted that IGOs speak in the name of the organization per se and not in their intergovernmental format. In addition, states like Canada, Japan, and Norway also integrate this discourse in their foreign policy (Kaul 1995; Zambelli 2000; McRae and Hubert 2001). The audience is not only composed of states, but the international civil society (communities and individuals beyond the state) also becomes an addressee of this discourse. The cultural and cognitive contexts are imbued with universalist liberal, emancipatory, and peace-oriented ideologies that place people and the individual at the center of the attention. Linked to peace and human rights movements of the 1970s, the basic assumptions go back to Rousseau and the idea of contract in order to protect the rights of the citizens, and preference is given to non-violence. Individual rather than state sovereignty is the principle which should guide international relations (Kilgour 2000). The dominant level of analysis is thus the individual sub-state level or the global level: for international civil servants this appears natural since they have to give their allegiance to their organization of reference rather than to a state, while for the state speakers such an approach might be explained by the peculiar perception of their state’s position in the international system (Bajpai 2000). Finally, the co-text includes for example the UN Charter and in particular art. 55 on economic, social, and human rights (although the majority of the principles contained in the UN Charter are based on traditional concepts of state sovereignty), and documents like the UN Declaration on Human Rights, the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Covenant on Economic and Social Rights. Other co-texts can be found in a number of publications which indirectly tackle issues of development, humanitarian assistance, and human rights at large.

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The Discursive Syntax and Semantics The referent objects in the human security discourse are individuals and sub-state communities on the one level, and the international community (or society) on the other. The reference to individuals or “ordinary people” is not necessarily in terms of citizens but more in terms of human beings (UNDP 1994: 3). The UN Commission on Human Security 2003 specifies “people suffering through violent conflict, migrants and refugees, people in post-conflict situations”, but other documents do not contain such a connotation. This implies a universalist approach where no significant geographical distinction is made. Well-being, quality of life, peace, human rights, development, freedom, and human dignity are normative referent objects rather than specific “interests” (UNDP 1994). The term interest does not seem to appear in the formulations of this type of discourse. Interestingly, these values are turned into referent objects not only in the case they are directly threatened, but they are also used as moral banners independently from the existence of an insecurity situation (which would not then justify the use of security syntax). Threats are interchangeably defined as problems, risks, vulnerabilities or challenges. Fear and want are seen as threats since the aim is to achieve “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want”. In particular, threats are subdivided into two categories: chronic threats including “disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political oppression and environmental hazards” and “unchecked population growth, disparities in economic opportunities, excessive international migration, environmental degradation, resource depletion, drug production and trafficking, international terrorism”; and sudden threats intended as humanitarian emergencies and violent conflicts or in general hurtful disruptions of the pattern of daily life (UNDP 1994: 22, 34). The first type of threats is of a structural nature and refers to the challenge of development, while the second type is more contingent and is similar to the idea of crisis (Suhrke 1999). It should be reminded that the state discourse of human security concerns only the second type of threats (Canada for example), and even if there are references to development, there is a clear distinction and development is not necessarily considered a security issue in policy terms. In addition, the HDR 1994 lists seven main categories of threats to human security: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. Interestingly, there is no idea of enemy or adversary, and the source of these threats is generally dispersed, although the implication for most of these threats is that the state is in final analysis the responsible and the source of insecurity. By the same token, the very same state is then the subject inasmuch as it is considered responsible for the well-being of its citizens and of whoever is under its jurisdiction. Individuals are also empowered and seen as subjects of security. Despite the fact that tasks may be delegated to individual Member States, the international community intended as the whole of its members (the United Nations)

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sees itself as not only the legitimated speaker but also as the ultimate decision- and action-maker. For what concerns the predicate, structural and operational prevention of violent conflicts are the dominant types of actions: the first one includes longterm engagement for the elimitation of deep-rooted sources of conflicts such as economic inequalities and poverty and includes institution-building, while the second one refers to short-term crisis management in order to prevent vertical or horizontal escalation of a conflict (see 1992 UN Agenda for Peace in Lodgaard 2002 and the “Responsibility to Protect” published by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty quoted in Biscop 2004a; Liotta and Owen 2006). In a sense, another type of predicate includes the promotion of peace or the values associated to it through a number of public relations campaigns (McRae and Hubert 2001). The prepositional phrases indicate a preference for a comprehensive multilateral and coordinated approach where priority is given to non-military means in missions which encompass peacekeeping, peacebuilding, disarmament, and economic development. By the same token, there is no geographical or time limitation, although long term engagement is deemed to be more effective. Implications for Policy and Behavior This “all-inclusive all-encompassing” discourse presents a number of challenges from the point of view of operationalization, exactly because most of the threats are diffused and do not necessarily entail an immediate existential danger. On the one hand, this discourse calls for long-term development policies of economic and financial assistance, peace-building, and institution-building which usually encompass different policy sectors (economy, finance, justice, and foreign policy for instance), while on the other it calls for short/medium-term missions such as fact-finding or observer missions, special envoys, the use of sanctions, peacekeeping, humanitarian aid and assistance (Lodgaard 2000). From the action point of view, despite the emphasis on long-term development, the focus is on the protection of the civilian population in armed conflicts rather than on a comprehensive concept. The major problem is that at the end of the day it is not possible to meaningfully de-territorialize international action, and that the main subjects of action are the states and their logic tends to dominate. As a matter of fact, from a human security discourse different and sometimes opposite agendas and policies may be simultaneously justified: apart from developmentalist policies tackling basic human needs, social welfare, and non-traditional security issues like diseases, terrorism, and inhumane weapons, more interventionist policies which include the use of force in an attempt to protect civilians from state-sponsored violence (violating state sovereignty in the name of individual sovereignty) may also be reconducted to this discourse (Newman 2001: 243–247; see also Regehr 1999; Kerr and Tow and Hanson 2003), despite the fact that military intervention often aggravates rather than solves human security issues (Liotta 2002: 480). This

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problem does not only refer to cases like the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, when force was used in the name of human rights, but human security justification might also be called upon in case of defense of other values that are considered by an actor as being of universal validity like democracy (Peceny 1999).

“Traditional Plus”: A Via Media? Comprehensive Security and Confusion As already stressed, the ideal-types discussed above are very theoretical and do not necessarily represent current security discourses and practices. This means that contemporary security discourses tend to simultaneously incorporate both approaches with variations depending on the specific situational, cultural, and cognitive contexts (Newman 2001). Particularly in reference to the post-Cold War order and to the threat of international terrorism, Westphalian and human security may converge blurring the distinction between internal/external hard/soft security and opening up new scopes of action in the economic, environmental, cultural, and social realms (Liotta 2002: 475). Associated to the approach represented by liberalism and the Copenhagen School, this “traditional plus” discourse maintains the same syntax and semantics of the Westphalian discourse while adding new qualifications drawn from the human concept: referent objects, potential threats, predicates, means and ways are expanded to accomodate changes in the the international system (the end of the Cold War and globalization). Contrary to the human security discourse, the state is still the central subject of action: however, it now perceives its survival and autonomy threatened not only by other states and military power, but also by other actors (multinational companies and terrorist groups for example) on a variety of different fronts (economic, environmental, demographic, cultural etc.) (�������� Mathews 1989: 162; Nye 1989: 24–25; Buzan et al. 1998). This discourse encompasses common, collective, cooperative and comprehensive security: interdependence and a multi-dimensional view of security calls for cooperation in tackling domestic sources of conflict and non-traditional issues (Butfoy 1997). The result is a “human realist” or “contingent realist” discourse that combines sovereignty, order, and stability, with references to values especially human rights, democracy, the market economy, and cooperation (Tow and Trood 2000: 22–24; Glaser 1994). The speakers are mainly the states, the UN in the format of the Security Council (that is, the collectivity of the states rather than a supposedly independent organ), or as it will be discussed in the second part, the EU, addressing in particular other states or the inter-state community at large. The referent object is still the state intended however in its divisible components: its citizens (their health and well-being), institutions (democracy), and values (Florini and Simmons 1998: 29). Value interests are in particular the maintenance of the existing territorial framework, the legality of the international system, and the reduction of overt violence and the maintenance of peace in areas of the world prone to conflict. Peace and stability are seen as instrumental not only for political-

Analyzing Security Discourses and Practices: A Typology

Table 4.1

Traditional and Human Security Discourses

Syntactical Forms Subjects (who)

Semantics A. Westphalian Discourse

B. Human Discourse

State, International

Global, Sub-regional, Individual (+ state and international) - governance Individual, Sub-regional (community) and global - universal values and norms (inclusive, humanitarian), personal safety and individual freedom

- government Referent Object (whom) (what)

Predicate

Prepositional Phrase (vertical where) Prepositional Phrase (horizontal where) Prepositional Phrase (when) Prepositional Phrase (with what instrument)

State - Territory, government, citizens (sovereignty) and relative values and interests (exclusive). Order and stability. Independence and national sovereignty To defend, to secure, to stabilize, to keep the peace (as order) State, International System Political-military sphere Short/Medium term Political-military (diplomacy and use of force), balance of power, limited values of norms and institutions

Threats

Other States (politicalmilitary). Direct threats

Speakers

State representatives (civilian and military) States (public)

Audience

83

To prevent and manage conflict, to keep the peace (as value) Global, Sub-regional, Individual Politics, Economics, Society, Environmental Long-term Political, Economic, Social, Societal, Environmental. Human development and humane governance Force as a secondary instrument to be used primarily for cosmopolitan ends and collectively. Cooperation, norms and institutions States, Global, Subregional, International, Individual – direct and indirect IGOs, NGOs, individuals States, International, Global, Sub-regional, Individual (public and private)

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military security but for a wider form of security which is, at least discursively, constructed to focus on the citizen (and not the individual per se as it is the case in the human discourse: see for instance rescue operations of citizens abroad). Other value-interests may be less specific and based on human ethics and morality, what however complicates operationalization of the discourse (Brown C. 2001: 26). Despite the acknowledgement of the existence of new multidimensional threats (often described as challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, declining productivity, or transnational issues of migration, criminality, and terrorism), territorial rationalization is applied, and threats are clearly categorized and kept distinct from challenges and risks for the sake of policy making: the search for an objective or subjective (in terms of responsibility) link between terrorist groups and states is a case in point. Given the centrality of state sovereignty, the subjects of action are of course state authorities, although multilateral fora are accepted as important legitimizers (Bellamy 2003). For what concerns the type of actions or the predicates, traditional defense is still important, but conflict prevention, peacemaking, and more general crisis management are introduced into the carnet exactly because it is recognized that instability abroad may be a direct threat to the internal stability of the state. Use of force is not renounced per se, and it is simply one of the available instruments: most importantly force is re-conceptualized and adapted to the challenges of the new tasks. Actions’ Discourse: The Business of Crisis Management and the Centrality of Peace The theoretical approaches discussed in Chapter 2 represent the backstage of policy development. The power struggle between exponents of different paradigms is replicated at the policy level (Bigo 1995). Actor-centric or trend-centric wideners challenge the traditional or Westphalian security discourse (Finel 1998: 8; see also Ullman 1983; Booth 1991a and 1991b; Klare and Thomas; Clarke 1993; Fischer 1993) with normative and prescriptive argumentations, and create new discourses of security, which co-exist and, depending on the contexts, may or may not become dominant and legitimized in the policy arena. But what is the impact of discourse on policy practice? As already argued, both at the grand strategic and at the operational level, a dominant discourse influences the choice of means and actions which are deemed appropriate in the practice of security or of “statecraft” (Doty 1997). In general, security policy is that part of government policy which has as its objective the creation of internal and external political conditions favourable to the protection or extension of vital values (and interests) against existing and potential threats (adapted from Trager and Simonie 1973: 36). Although there are new understandings of security, and as we have seen, concurrent discourses calling for a wider approach, the policy means chosen continue, to a large extent, to be military ones. The consequence is a gap between the way in which the security context is described and interpreted, and the kind

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of security policy means actually adopted. As it will be briefly shown in the discussion of some examples of national security discourses, the development at the discursive level has two major implications for security policy: a) the definition of the main task of the military in terms of crisis management rather than territorial defense; and b) an increased focus on a more holistic approach which highlights the role of civilians and cooperation, and the link between security, defense, and foreign policy on the one hand and other internal policy fields on the other (Cohen and Mihalka 2001). In particular, as it is shown in Table 4.2, the administrative and bureaucratic boundaries between public security and external security and defense are increasingly challenged, although they are formally kept for a variety of reasons (such as interest groups and domestic power distribution) (Pastore 2001). If on the one hand it becomes more and more complicated to disentangle internal from external issues, on the other the modality of the use of force and the associated doctrines have been progressively updated to accommodate the changes in the environment acknowledged by the new discourse. In particular, a dominant traditional-plus discourse enables changes in the doctrines about the use of force to incorporate missions like peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention, whereby defensive rather than offensive use of force is the rule (Reichberg and Syse 2003). This is in line with an ethical approach to international affairs and in particular Just War theory (encapsulated in international law), according to which the resort to armed force is legitimated if it is a reaction against offences in cases for instance of self-defense (individual or collective), protection of other peoples (humanitarian), or punishment for illegal behavior, provided that the response is limited, proportionate, and immediately following the attack in the case of self-defense (as per art. 51 UN Charter), and in addition mandated by the UN Security Council in all the others (Reichberg and Syse 2003:316). It should be noted that the fact that self-defense does not require authorization is a matter of controversy in practice (see for instance the US concept of preemption), as it is third party intervention in the event of UN inaction (for example NATO in Kosovo). Table 4.2

Security and Defense: Traditional Bureaucratic Division of Labor Public Security

Defense (or external security)

Focus Political Responsibility

Domestic (internal) Ministry of Interior

Interstate (external) Min. of Foreign Affairs – Defense

Means

Civilian police, judiciary

EU correspondence

EU: 3rd pillar Justice and Home Affairs

Diplomatic, military (+gendarmeries) EU: 2nd pillar Common Foreign and Security Policy

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In addition, grand strategies and doctrines are not the only indicators of the role and qualification of the use of force: at the operational level, the Rules of Engagement (ROE) also reflect the “politically acceptable means” dictated by the law of armed conflict, domestic law, operational factors, political factors, diplomatic factors and the values of the unit, and give guidelines concerning when the use of force is authorized and to what extent according to the situation in order to assure coherence. Usually, the right of self-defense can never be denied regardless of the type of operation (Roach 1983: 43). This is particularly challenging in case of missions other than war like peacekeeping and crisis management when escalation caused by operational self-defense may threaten to transform the rationale and the expected consequences of the action (Stedman 1997). In this context and in order to highlight the challenges inherent to the application of old instruments to new challenges, it is necessary to articulate with more details the catalogue of actions or means (in operative terms) integrated into the “traditional plus” discourse and constituting now the majority of international security practices. Security policy is increasingly seen as an “instrument to uphold the law” (Sjursen 2000: 17) and to promote and defend peace. Heavily influenced by international law and the discourses developed in the UN context, and in particular Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which define in broader terms what actions can be allowed in order to protect international security, crisis is defined as a breach to peace, and it is considered as a major source of international insecurity and by corollary of national insecurity (Findley 2002). The problem in this conceptualization is that crisis does not necessarily or automatically mean conflict (or outbreak of violence), and that peace is reified to justify any type of action intrusive or not of other states’ sovereignty, long or short-termed, structural or operational, coercive or not. The actions/measures can be categorized on the basis of the final aim or predicate of building, maintaining, restoring, or enforcing peace (ICG 2001), and range from conflict prevention to conflict management. Conflict and war (as the opposite of peace) are the major threats in this discourse. The use of force is legitimized in order to prevent or “preempt” or eliminate this threat. Ironically, although basically built upon the same means (coercive and non), this type of operations assume a different value only because they are motivated and justified in the name of a supposed higher and universal referent object, that is peace (in the application of the Machiavellian adage that the aims justify the means). As a matter of fact, in the UN jargon these “peace-support operations” (PSO) range from war-fighting (coercion through the use of military force), stabilization (ability to gain monopoly on use of force, coercive power), to observation and separation, while conflict prevention and peacemaking (after a dispute has become violent) include classical diplomatic instruments or preventive diplomacy as set out in Chapter VI of the UN Charter. Preventive deployment refers to the deployment of military or civilian personnel with the intention to prevent the escalation of a dispute into an armed conflict, while traditional peacekeeping involves the impartial deployment of military forces pursuant to a cease-fire or peace settlement

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in order to monitor the implementation of the agreement with consent of the parties involved (see UN Chapter “6 and ½”). Multi-dimensional or “peacekeeping plus” involves military, police, and civilian components: the military monitors and if necessary enforces the respect of the agreements, disarmament and demobilisation of combatants, and provides for security for international activities; the tasks of the police are to provide for the public order “like establishment and maintenance of a judicial system, law enforcement, monitoring, training and advising local law enforcement authorities on organisational, administrative and human rights issues”; and the civilian component is responsible for political assistance and institutionbuilding, election coordination and monitoring, education and promotion of human rights, and delivery and implementation of humanitarian aid programs among many other things (Hansen and Ramsbotham and Woodhouse 2001: 4–5). This type of missions clearly includes elements of peace-building or societal reengineering and of peace-enforcement. In fact, peace-enforcement refers to the threat or use of force undertaken by the international community under chapter VII of the UN Charter with the intention of attaining peace in response to conflicts or other major security crises in order to force the parties to a dispute into compliance with international law (which prohibits the use of force as a settlement of disputes): in the case of peacekeeping, the forces on the ground might be called upon to use force in order to enforce the respect of the agreement or in case of internal security breakdown situation (ICG 2001: 15–16). This means that despite the fact that the referent object is peace, force still plays an important role in providing the conditions for its security. Another important point has to be made in consideration of the adjective “humanitarian”: humanitarian operations and intervention, often used interchangeably, are substantially different. Humanitarian operations refer to the provision of aid in case of human distress, while humanitarian intervention means the use of force in order to protect human rights violations in a third country (Wheeler 2000). The problem is that these notions are integrated without further qualifications in national security discourses giving way to ambiguity and inconsistencies, because they are used in different situational contexts. A case in point is the confusion between peacemaking and peace-enforcement: while the two are clearly separated in the UN jargon with peacemaking pertaining to diplomacy and foreign policy rather than defense policy, state discourses and practices (including the EU) adopt peacemaking as synonymous of peace-enforcement, whereby the use of force is explicitly contemplated (see Binnendik 2002: 30; and below). The Means: Changing Role of the Armed Forces? If the major predicates are constructed around peace, the use of military means – which are heavily qualified by the traditional discourse – has to be in a way reformulated in order to be adapted to the supposedly changed context or better to the new discourse.

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Military power, albeit used in more circumscribed ways, is still considered the ultimate weapon perceived by states for protecting and promoting their vital national interests (Salmon 1996: 12). Because of its existentiality (in terms of life or death), the military dimension tends to dominate in final considerations of security policy (Buzan 1991b: 35). This does not mean that civilian means are not important: however, force is seen as the necessary instrument of last resort (although the chronological connotation of “last” varies), and in many cases its mere existence is the decisive factor in brokering security (for deterrence for instance, see Garnett 1970: 28). Central to military power are the armed forces as a bureaucratic organization. Traditionally, the fundamental tasks of the armed forces of a state are to defend sovereign territory and interests, or attack the territory and interests of other sovereign states, and to participate in the drawing of state borders and statebuilding (Janowitz 1964). In times of peace, the armed forces are obviously required to perform non-war-fighting tasks, and this is where the changing theoretical meaning and the new discourse intervene. The range of tasks the armed forces are called to perform now include non-traditional areas such as “non-combatant evacuation operations, humanitarian and disaster relief, demining, peacekeeping or peace-enforcement, resolving serious urban unrest, addressing conflicts over resources, addressing problems of law enforcement like smuggling” (Wing 2000: 2). This broadening to accommodate new referent objects is particularly interesting because force is here interpreted as potentially positive, an assumption rejected by extremist human security supporters. In this conceptualization, the army is seen as “protector of civilization” (Keegan 1993: 391–392) or “Ambassador, Teacher, Soldier, Peacekeeper” (Moskos and Burk 1998) rather than an aggressive warmongering institution. The blurred separation between the military management of violence and other tasks which were usually responsibility of civilian public security has favored the introduction of the idea of a “post-modern military (…) likely to focus primarily on peacekeeping and humanitarian missions; to be a smaller, all-volunteer force of professionals, with officers who see themselves as soldier-statesmen rather than as combat leaders or managers of violence; and to enjoy only tepid public support” (Moskos and Burk 1998). This transition from being a realist territorial institution (Moeller 2000b) to becoming a sort of “constabulary force” seeking “viable international relations rather than victory” with minimum use of force (Hu