Description
When the George W. Bush administration extended its successful domestic securitization of Iraq with an attempt to garner international support for the invasion, US allies had to make a momentous decision: to securitize or not to securitize. Two of the US’ most important European partners—the UK and Germany—made very different choices. While the UK also securitized Iraq to enable its active participation in the war, Germany refrained from doing so. I argue that these state-level outcomes resulted from Tony Blair’s and Gerhard Schröder’s individual securitization choices, which in turn were based on their threat perceptions and action preferences in terms of conflictual or cooperative means. Using both leadership trait and operational code analysis, I demonstrate that the two leaders’ personality traits and beliefs affected their perceptions of the ‘Iraqi threat’ in different ways and thus led to diverging securitization choices, which can be observed empirically in the shape of speech acts. Understanding these choices is important for foreign policy analysts because if an issue or actor is elevated to the realm of security, this move changes the set of foreign policy options governments can choose from. For instance, military interventions by democracies only become viable after successful securitization.
