Anxious community: EU as (in)security community

ABSTRACT

From the Eurocrisis to the migration crisis, and from Brexit to a strengthening far right, the European Union (EU) faces multiple stressors. But while crises unleash anxiety, they do not necessarily portend the worst: because they disrupt old routines, crises can open space for new political possibilities. As a self-consciously hybrid, ‘post-national’ political form, the EU would seem poised to take advantage. Instead it is stuck. In this paper, taking an ontological security approach and focusing on EU migration governance, I propose that one cause of paralysis could lie – ironically – in an aspect of the EU that is crucial to its normative power: Europe’s long peace. An ontological security perspective highlights the management of existential anxiety as crucial to identity, suggesting how different modes of anxiety management have different political effects. Applied here, EU narratives and routines preserving ‘no war’ might suppress relations of structural power; they might mimic primitive defense mechanisms; or they might be symptoms pointing to unconscious processes keeping difficult knowledge – including colonial pasts – undealt with. I suggest how migration governance might manifest these mechanisms, contributing to the difficulties of desecuritising migration and linking its governance to EU values and institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• EU
• unthinkability
• ontological security
• anxiety
• suppression
• repression
• stigma

Acknowledgements

For very helpful feedback on previous drafts, many thanks to Patricia Greve, Catarina Kinnvall, Alanna Krolikowski, Ian Manners, Alex Wendt, and the participants in the 2017 workshops, “Political Psychology and EU Integration,” at Helsinki and Ystad.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Mitzen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University, with research interests in international relations theory, global governance, and international security. Her current book project theorizes from an ontological security perspective the role of home in the constitution of political subjectivity and the ways it disciplines political imagination. Recent publications include: “Ontological Security and Foreign Policy,” in Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (2017, co-authored with Kyle Larson); “Security Communities and the Unthinkabilities of War,” in Annual Review of Political Science (2016); “Illusion or Intention?: Talking Grand Strategy into Existence,” in Security Studies (2015); and, as coeditor (with Catarina Kinnvall), “Ontological Securities in World Politics,” a special issue of Cooperation and Conflict (2017).

Notes

1 The next several paragraphs are adapted from Mitzen (2016).

2 This table is adapted from Mitzen (2016, p. 235).