Articulating Sovereignty within the Infrastructural Imagination: The Case of the Securitisation of Finance as ‘Critical Infrastructure’

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, financial markets have been labelled ‘critical infrastructures,’ putting them on par with other macro-functions deemed vital for the constitution and continuation of contemporary. This paper argues that, this discursive move signals a securitisation of finance that, together with an infrastructural imaginary of society, produces new articulations of and new claims to political sovereignty. The notion of ‘infrastructure’ is bound up with the historically northern understanding of political sovereignty and security as involving territorial integrity, full functionality of societally vital services, and the controlled mobilisation of persons, groups, objects, symbols, and value tokens. At the same time, the example of the securitisation of finance as critical infrastructure shows that such a claim to sovereignty is ready to accept an alleged ‘own’ logic of finance and its technologies of financial securitisation, which brought about the permeation of finance into virtually all economic sectors in the first place. Thus, the securitisation of finance as infrastructure articulates a version of sovereignty that shifts the securitising initiative back to the polity but at the same time responsibilises the polity for safeguarding, and indeed promoting, the peculiar dynamics of the societal sector thus securitised.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stefan Kaufmann and his colloquium at the University of Freiburg as well as Gideon Van Riet (North-West University) and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 http://www.ridgway.pitt.edu/Portals/1/pdfs/Publications/Eckert.pdf (last accessed 23 February 2019).

2 https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/nipp-ssp-financial-services-2015-508.pdf (last accessed 23 February 2019).

3 https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/e-library/docs/pdf/2009_dependencies_en.pdf#zoom=100 (last accessed 23 February 2019).

4 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2006:0786:FIN:EN:PDF (last accessed 23 February 2019).

5 https://subs.emis.de/LNI/Proceedings/Proceedings36/GI-Proceedings.36-7.pdf (last accessed 23 February 2019).

6 https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/e-library/docs/pdf/ra_ver2_en.pdf#zoom=100 (last accessed 23 February 2019).

7 With respect to the European Union, cf. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/crisis-and-terrorism/critical-infrastructure_en, and with respect to legislation ‘Council Directive 2008/114/EC of 8 December 2008 on the identification and designation of European critical infrastructures and the assessment of the need to improve their protection.’ Concerning the U.S., cf. https://www.dhs.gov/critical-infrastructure-sectors, and in terms of legislation, ‘Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21): Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience.’

8 A third one concerns the maybe too straightforward relativisation of financialisation theorems, as if basic economic operations and logics of profit maximisation could be that easily separated from one another. This, however, cannot be explored within the confines of this article.

9 Here one might cite the numerous securitizations performed by the current U.S. president, which are excellent examples for securitising moves that, however random, unfounded, and publicly critiqued, still become effective as frame setters.

10 Abulof (2014) takes up this point with respect to the ‘deep securitization’ of the state of Israel.

11 Similar arguments can be found in Westermeier (2018), who reconstructs the authorisation of financial experts as troubleshooters by political institutions, and in Bieling (2014), according to whom the debate about the financial crisis has split into a popular criticism of finance which however is ineffective against the domain of expert discourse informing political decision making.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been conducted in the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 ‘Dynamics of Security’ at the Universities of Giessen and Marburg, under a grant from the German Research Foundation.