Description
The Flanders Poppy emerged as a symbol of British remembrance after the First World War, sold to commemorate military sacrifices and to raise funds for returning veterans, their families, and the bereaved. Originally worn in early November in the run up to Armistice Day, recent years has seen the dramatic temporal and spatial expansion of poppy-themed remembrance. What lies behind this trend? In this paper, I bring Critical Military Studies scholarship on remembrance into conversation with work in Ontological Security Studies. Whereas the former has viewed anxiety primarily as instability, the latter argues that it can also be generated by feelings of existential meaninglessness, sometimes leading actors to court change and instability. The paper argues that whereas anxieties in the aftermath of the First World War led to the creation of remembrance practices intended to stabilise the social order by confining grieving to narrowly-defined times and spaces, anxieties around meaningless in late modern British society, coupled with the militarization of British society over the course of the ‘War on Terror’, have led to the expansion of remembrance into ever greater areas of social life as a way of re-signifying the everyday with existential meaning. Such processes ironically generate anxieties resulting from the tension between drives for stability and meaning.
