Geopolitical Caesuras as Time-Space-Anchors of Ontological (In)security: The Case of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

ABSTRACT

The paper reviews the concept of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to shed light on (dis)continuous narratives of selfhood engendered by geopolitics. It contributes to a growing body of empirically grounded research by addressing the necessity of a multi-dimensional understanding of individuals’ senses of ontological (in)security. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in Berlin with participants of various age groups and argues that ontological security and insecurity are negotiated through spatial and temporal means. It demonstrates that geopolitical caesuras, as powerful intergenerational geographical imaginations, function as time-space anchors of ontological (in)security. It further studies this multi-dimensionality by conceptualising temporal and spatial means of ontological (in)security and their relational interconnectedness to unsettle the binaries of global and local, and past and present. Finally, this paper recommends reconsidering the usage of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to mobilise a feminist approach towards geopolitics.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Miro Born, Yannick Ecker and Ylva Kürten for conducting the interviews we refer to in this paper and Carl-Jan Dihlmann for his support as research assistant as well as Henning Füller for his support in implementing the research project ‘Geographic Imaginations: People’s Sense of Security and Insecurity in a Cross-Generational Comparison’ at the DFG-funded collaborative research center ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’ (CRC 1265). We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing very helpful critiques and comments.

Declaration of Interest Statement

The author(s) declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. This insight is also shared by approaches drawing on psychoanalysis, in particular following Jacques Lacan. Lacanian psychoanalysis is based on the assumption that issues like the unconscious are not taking place inside of our head, but are localised and spatialised within the world outside of us (Blum and Secor 2011; Kingsbury 2007; Pohl 2020). However, in terms of ontological security, it has been questioned whether Lacan allows us to understand ‘how the individual obtains a sense of coherence and how this connects with reassurance in the “reality” of the external world’ (Giddens 1991a, 96). More recent works have shown that Lacanian psychoanalysis indeed offers a suitable approach to understand how subjects feel about certain narrative constructions, such as geopolitical caesuras (e.g. the fall of the Berlin Wall) as well as to carefully examine the conditions and modalities necessary for the subject to be ontologically secure (Browning 2019; Browning and Joenniemi 2017; Pohl et al.2020).

2. The nexus of ‘intimacy’ and global politics has been discussed in various case studies by Barabantseva, Mhurchú, and Peterson (2019). The goal is to establish the intimate as a productive heuristic tool by focusing on familiar ‘personal’ and ‘private’ attachments in the nexus of geopolitics and its inherent power relations.

3. All interview partners are anonymised. The interviews were conducted in German and translated by the authors.

4. The debate about the fall of the wall in Germany and its subsequent political and economic transformation processes are being widely addressed across interdisciplinary fields (cf. Klinge 2015; Lang, Mushaben, and Wendler 2017; Mau 2019). For example, Westerhof and Keyes (2006) studied perceptions and consequences of socio-physiological stability and shapes of ‘well-being’ in the course of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the role of walls and borders in identity formation and security has been addressed (Stephenson 2013), along with fundamental historical classifications of post-communistic transformation processes, coping strategies (Rose 2010), and memory making (Camia, Menzel, and Bohn 2019; Harrison 2019).

5. The field of border studies offers important debates on the role and perception of borders (Newman 2006; Wilson and Donnan 2012), their effects (Nieswand 2018), and their living experiences within the everyday (Brun 2019; Kudžmaitė and Pauwels 2020) and ‘bordering practices’ (Agius and Edenborg 2019; Agius 2017; Cash and Kinnvall 2017). With this paper, we explicitly address ontological security as an analytical tool within the discourse of geopolitics to widen the understanding of everyday narratives engendered by geopolitics.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was funded by the DFG-funded collaborative research centre “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [CRC 1265 “Re-figuration of Spaces”].