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2018 | Book

Seeking Alternative Connections Between Civilisation and Security Read chapter Read first chapter

NATO, Civilisation and Individuals

The Unconscious Dimension of International Security

Author: Sarah da Mota

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : New Security Challenges

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book critically engages with NATO’s two main referent objects of security: civilisation and individuals. By rethinking the seemingly natural assumption of these two referent objects, it suggests the epistemological importance of an unconscious dimension to understand meaning formation and behaviour change in international security.
The book provides a historicised and genealogical approach of the idea of civilisation that is at the core of the Alliance, in which human needs, narratives, and security arrangements are interconnected. It suggests that there is a Civilised Subject of Security at the core of modern Western security that has constantly produced civilised and secure subjects around the world, which explains NATO’s emergence around a civilisational referent. The book then proceeds by considering the Individualisation of Security after the Cold War as another stage of the civilising process, based on NATO’s military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Seeking Alternative Connections Between Civilisation and Security
Abstract
As civilisation within NATO is commonly portrayed in monolithic and essentialist terms, important interpretive spaces remain regarding the idea of civilisation and its implications for security. The predominance of short duration perspectives veils the role of individuals, their needs, perceptions and behaviour, for understanding the relationship between civilisation and international security. Civilisation and security need to be reconciled through a more comprehensible, humanising, approach that incorporates the role of unconscious forms of knowledge and social duration. To that end, a long duration approach is needed, one that allows for the historicisation and genealogical development of the idea of civilisation that is at the core of the Alliance, and interconnects human needs, narratives, and security arrangements throughout its evolution.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 2. IR’s Disciplinary Connections with Western Civilisation
Abstract
This chapter is the first step of the wider purpose that aims at providing a longer and deeper sense of history in the denaturalisation of the knowledge on civilisation. It questions the apparent absence of the West from IR and shows, on the contrary, how the evolution of IR as a discipline has been closely connected to the evolution of (Western) civilisation in both individual and collective perceptions. IR thus needs to be understood as a discipline, a source of knowledge, whose origin and raison d’être depend on the very crises of Western civilisation. The socio-political and intellectual context in which IR evolved across the twentieth century indicates that it can hardly be dissociated from the evolution of Western society’s own perceptions, increasing awareness on, and reflexivity of, its civilisation.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 3. Individualising Civilisation: The Civilised Subject of Security
Abstract
This chapter proposes to individualise the approach of civilisation through a set of different conceptual and theoretical tools, mostly derived from sociology and psychoanalysis, especially the notion of “civilised habitus”. What does civilisation consists of, and how is it related to conceptions of security? How does civilisation contribute to security? Narrowing down the idea of civilisation to individuals, it is argued, is a missing link for an improved understanding of the unconscious dimension of international security. This approach materialises into the conceptualisation of a Civilised Subject of Security, framed within the unconscious processes that compose the ontological relation between civilisation and security. Security, it is claimed, is the ultimate value giving an ontological sense to the process of civilisation, for its deep and metaphysical bonding character in human societies. In short, a civilised subject of the West has been forcefully a secure subject.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 4. Standards of Civilisation: Architecting Security, Order, and Hierarchy
Abstract
This chapter unpacks the notion of “standard of civilisation” and underlying processes as a central development of international society and security. Standardisation is thus approached as a process that is endemic of civilisation for its crucial contribution to the normative dissemination and spatial-temporal advancement of civilisation. This helps understanding how civilisation coped not only with the formation of an identity in relation to a specific social system, but also how a secure status spread across time, space and subjectivities. In the West, the role of standards has been critical to the empowerment of men, enabled by the symbolic power and capital historically accumulated by the West. Within this process of standardisation, security is the norm that made it natural for civilisation to become an international standard for international normative order and hierarchy.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 5. NATO’s Deep Origins (1939–1949): Unbreaking the Civilised Habitus?
Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of “civilisation” in the formation of the Alliance, by highlighting the antecedents leading to the need to safeguard the civilisation of the North-Atlantic people. By focusing on the 1939–1949 period, the extent to which civilisation needed to be upheld through a Western organisation of defence and security is assessed. How far were the civilised habitus and the Civilised Subjects of Security on the verge of being lost? Key elements such as the lack of self-restraint, the stereotyping of the Soviet Union as uncivilised, the role of spirituality and symbolism, and the reinforcement of interdependence are the most significant manifestations and expressions of the civilised habitus during that period. Together, they show how the civilised habitus was reformulated, redefined and reasserted, and help understanding that the Alliance emerged around civilisation as a formative referent object of security.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 6. NATO’s Cold War Evolution: Civilisation from Referent Object to Standard
Abstract
Civilisation proved to be a central concern in the deep origins and formation of the Alliance (Chap. 5), but how did that concern evolve afterwards? From its birth in 1949 to the end of the Cold War, NATO’s discourses show how the representation of civilisation, or civilised behaviour, suffered modifications through time, depending on the social priorities of given temporal periods. Across those decades, the Alliance evolved very aware of its time, consistently displaying reflexivity about its current pertinence in the world, what role it should play, what mission it should embrace. In this sense, the civilised habitus of the West was continued at the level of a democratic habitus. Ultimately, the evolution of NATO’s referent object reveals as an open process, in which both conscious and unconscious perceptions about Selfhood and time cohabit.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 7. Post-Cold War NATO: New Ways and Reasons for Coexistence
Abstract
What are the deepest implications of this new historic era for NATO’s civilisational referent? Within its post-Cold War reinvention, NATO’s identity has remained essentially the same regarding its representations of time. The Alliance’s constant will to adapt to, and awareness of, change shapes expectations and dispositions (habiti) about what NATO is willing to do to protect North-Atlantic communities from whatever unknown threats. Those new forms of socialisation consist of new ways of behaving for partners and candidates to membership, as they also entail new interdependent relationships. The willingness to belong to NATO as a security community draws on the symbolic power of past memories and the fear of the loss of love as an ontological need for security. As a consequence, post-Cold War NATO set new rules of civilised behaviour, so that civilised identities could be attuned, developing into a civilising security community.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 8. The Individualisation of Security: A New Architecture for International Security
Abstract
As the most decisive and influential normative trend of post-Cold War international security, the Individualisation of Security has progressively re-oriented security policies and their related discourses and rationales from the state to the individual. The Individualisation of Security has entailed the reformulation of security policies and the very conduct of war, reconfiguring them around a different conception of life-valuation that has the Liberal individual at its core. Through the strong ideological and biopolitical stances of humanitarianism, the Individualisation of Security has produced an international discourse of discipline and normalisation, according to which a conduct that is respectful of individuals should be held as natural for all states. This illustrates the extension of the civilising power through international organisations and can be considered as another stage of the civilising process coming from the West.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 9. The Individualisation of Security Within NATO
Abstract
To what extent has NATO as a security community been influenced by the Individualisation of Security as another stage of the civilising process? As a normative transformation of international security, the Individualisation of Security is very significant for the Alliance, for it complements and serves the purpose of its institutional reinvention after the Cold War. Fundamentally, the Individualisation of Security also serves the sustainability of NATO’s civilisational referent. The role of the individual referent of security is assessed in NATO’s military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, by focusing on particular aspects of each mission: the referent object of security, the justification advanced for the intervention, their formal mandate, their objectives, their normative principles, their self-declared results, always in the light of NATO’s civilisational narrative.
Sarah da Mota
Chapter 10. Conclusion
Abstract
Contradicting the prevailing attention to NATO’s change in terms of survival, this book approaches NATO by focusing on the deepest structures of individuals. The Alliance’s two main referent objects of security—civilisation and individuals—are thereby entangled within a narrative of timelessness, connected in space and time by the unconscious dimension of security. Ultimately, the existence of the unconscious structures of human mind critically suggest that the representations of security are not the fruit of a conscious or voluntary choice of practices and meanings by the subjects, but rather the result of domination, disciplining and exclusionary practices, long-term processes of inculcation, and symbolic perceptions.
Sarah da Mota
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
NATO, Civilisation and Individuals
Author
Sarah da Mota
Copyright Year
2018
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-74409-4
Print ISBN
978-3-319-74408-7
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74409-4

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