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ABSTRACT
The European Union is widely credited for consolidating a democratic “security community” in Europe, and bringing about a definitive break with war-torn and authoritarian/totalitarian pasts in many European countries. Drawing on recent discussions in ontological security studies, this article points out that these radical breaks may have come at the expense of ontological insecurity at the societal and individual levels in Europe. While conventional teleological narratives often treat reconciliation and breaking with the past as automatic by-products of European integration, ontological security theory calls for greater attention to the societal tensions and anxieties triggered by these transformations and how they are being managed –more or less successfully – through reconciliation dynamics and memory politics in different societal settings. Illustrating the variation in a number of cases, this article claims that a systematic comparative analysis of the different dynamics of reconciliation and memory politics in different European societies is central to analyzing European integration from an ontological security perspective.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Dr. Bahar Rumelili is Professor and Jean Monnet Chair at the Department of International Relations, Koc University, Istanbul. Her research has focused on international relations theory, processes of European identity construction, conflict resolution, and the interaction between the EU and Turkish politics and civil society. She is the author of Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Palgrave, 2007) and the editor of Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxieties (Routledge 2015). Her articles have appeared in journals such as European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Journal of International Relations and Development among others.