Countering hybrid warfare as ontological security management: the emerging practices of the EU and NATO

ABSTRACT

What are the ethical pitfalls of countering hybrid warfare? This article proposes an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU and NATO’s engagement with hybrid threats. It illustrates how hybrid threat management collapses their daily security struggles into ontological security management exercise. This has major consequences for defining the threshold of an Article 5 attack and the related response for NATO, and the maintenance of a particular symbolic order and identity narrative for the EU. The institutionalisation of hybrid threat counteraction emerges as a routinisation strategy to cope with the “known unknowns”. Fostering resilience points at the problematic prospect of compromising the fuzzy distinction between politics and war: the logic of hybrid conflicts presumes that all politics could be reduced to a potential build-up phase for a full-blown confrontation. Efficient hybrid threat management faces the central paradox of militant democracy whereby the very attempt to defend democracy might harm it.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybrid warfare
• ontological security
• resilience
• European Union
• NATO
• IR theory

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ISA Workshop “Fear, Trauma and Belonging: The Everyday of Ontological Security in International Relations”, Baltimore, MD, February 2017; 3rd Helsinki Workshop on European Integration and Political Psychology, Helsinki, June 2017, and 11th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Barcelona, September 2017. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, Brent Steele, Alexandra Homolar, Ian Manners, Catarina Kinnvall, Jennifer Mitzen, Tuomas Forsberg, the respective workshop participants, Trine Flockhart, and Iver B. Neumann for their encouragement and genuinely helpful feedback. All remaining inconsistencies remain my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maria Mälksoo is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical security studies, memory and identity politics, international political sociology and critical IR theory. She is the author of The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries (Routledge, 2010) and a co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012). She has published on European security politics, liminality, memory wars, memory laws, transitional justice and foreign policy in Eastern Europe and Russia in the International Studies Review, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and in various edited volumes.

ORCID

Maria Mälksoo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7110-2050

Notes

1 Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak (2014) has invoked this expression to capture the Russian political technology of a military occupation staged as a non-occupation by anonymous troops without insignia.

2 E.g. “Hostile states pose ‘fundamental threat’” (2016).

3 The IR literature on OS is steadily expanding. For a recent special issue on the concept, see Cooperation and Conflict (2017), edited by Catarina Kinnvall and Jennifer Mitzen, two of the key launchers of the notion in the discipline. For an authoritative book-length account, see Steele (2008).

4 See further Mitzen (2016) for the various types of “unthinkabilities” of war.

5 Yet, as Lupovici (2016) shows with his study of the idea and practices of deterrence, the ambiguity between peace and war is not invariably a source of ontological insecurity. Rather, as he argues, the “deterrer identity” has been a major base of OS for the United States and Israel throughout the Cold War and after.

6 I.e., defending “the EU, its Member States and citizens” from the “disinformation and misinformation campaigns and propaganda” (European Parliament 2016).

7 NATO’s Strasbourg/Kehl Summit declaration (2009) maintains that

it is increasingly important that the Alliance communicates in an appropriate, timely, accurate and responsive manner on its evolving roles, objectives and missions. Strategic communications are an integral part of our efforts to achieve the Alliance’s political and military objectives.

8 See Sperling and Webber (2017) for a comprehensive take on NATO’s (re)securitisation of Russia in connection with the Ukraine crisis.

9 Note that the EU is currently considering the applicability of its solidarity clause (Article 222 TFEU) “in case a wide-ranging and serious hybrid attack occurs” (European Commission 2017).

10 See http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu/content/20160313172652/http://eeas.europa.eu/top_stories/2015/261115_stratcom-east_qanda_en.htm (accessed 5 April 2018). The EU Mythbusters are available on Twitter at https://twitter.com/EUvsDisinfo (accessed 5 April 2018).

11 See also http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_131283.htm (accessed 5 April 2018).

12 Notably, Finland is not a member of NATO, so locating the new Centre there illustrates the purposeful bridge-building attempts of the two organisations in countering the hybrid menace together. The current members of the Centre are Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, France, Germany, the United States, Estonia, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, Czech Republic, and Denmark.

13 For NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence’s definition of strategic communication-related activities and capabilities, see http://www.stratcomcoe.org/about-strategic-communications (accessed 5 April 2018). See also STRATCOMCOE@STRATCOMCOE.