Description
A series of recent crises contributed to ontological insecurity in different parts of the world. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), this took a distinctly geopolitical dimension. Nativist and authoritarian leaders utilised the disruptions to construct CEE’s identity through distancing from ‘the West’. In turn, for the parts of the society identifying as ‘(pro-)Western’, such discourses reignited the tension in seeing ‘Westernness’ both as deeply ingrained civilizational ‘essence’ and as something that can always be taken away. Using Czechia as a case, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ responded to such geopolitical anxieties of the ‘Western’ camp and reinscribed societal divisions in the familiar register of East/West geopolitics. First, by presenting Russia as omnipotent enemy meddling by various means in CEE politics, it enabled the externalisation of domestic dissenters as essentially foreign to the ‘Western’ body: as Russia’s agents or ‘useful idiots’. Second, by positing the weakening and splitting the EU and NATO as Russia’s ultimate goal, it reconstructed ‘the West’ as a coherent geopolitical entity of which Czechia is a part: in this logic, ‘we the Westerners’ are all together a target of Russia’s ‘hybrid’ attacks. The psychosocial and political effects of this discourse are contradictory. While providing ontological security through the reinforced identification with the ‘West’ for some, it also undermines this sense of security by its continuing search for Russia’s ‘Eastern’ influences behind domestic and international woes, thereby reinforcing the existing societal divides and reproducing the sense of insecurity and anxiety.
