Description
Title: HUMAN RIGHTS AND EUROPEAN ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY; The “Crisis” That the Refugees Gave Rise To
Abstract:
The ontological security approach primarily focuses on identity and security relations and is mainly founded on a socio-psychological basis. That being so, it delivers us a way to study securitization on a bottom-up scale. Mitzen (2006), in a most basic way, defines it as the need to experience oneself as a whole, a continuous person in time – as being rather than constantly changing – in order to realize a sense of agency. Besides Laing (2010) indicate that for ontologically secure subject their identity and autonomy are never in question. During the period between 2015-2016, Europe faced the largest inflow of refugees since World War II (Nieman & Zaun, 2017; Lavenex, 2018). Since the number of refugees was unexpected, it was commonly voiced that the EU had been in crisis. However, it is not an actual but perceptional issue, and the essence of the whole problem is primarily existential, and it is indeed stimulated by the existing uncertainties about the European Unions's (EU) future (Kinnvall et al., 2018; Mitzen, 2018; Kaunert et al., 2020).
Straightforwardly, the EU does not indicate merely a well-defined territory in a Westphalian sense; rather, it is a political being with an identity included those routines and narratives which constitute the EU's self-identity. Therefore, it can also enter into ontological security-seeking activities. Considering this, the paper aims to demonstrate that the so-called refugee crisis was essentially an existential dilemma, so a matter of ontological security in terms of the EU. To support this claim, this paper examines the peculiarities of the existing refugee dilemma regarding the issue's racial, cultural, and historical dimensions. Besides, the question of how far human right is enough to restore the EU's sense of ontological security after the refugee influx is specifically addressed. Different from the normative perspectives, human rights, and today's human rights discourse are discussed from a critical perspective through this paper.
Keywords: Ontological Security, Human Right, European Union, Migration, Refugee Crisis, Security
References
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