Description
The illegal Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022 has led to significantly revised tasks and purposes for most militaries in Western Europe. After a post-Cold War period of down-scaling and professionalization, with many militaries’ main focus being directed toward participation in international missions in the name of countering (comparatively) diffuse threats in the form of failed states and international terrorism, the recent decade is marked by a return to territorial defence of the home territory as main task and purpose. While some scholars have argued that ‘having an enemy to fight and a home territory to defend’ represents a more ‘traditional’ and motivating story about who militaries are and what they are supposed to do than participation in international missions, others maintained that the post-Cold War period produced ‘neural’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ militaries with purely defensive self-understandings in many parts of Western Europe. At the same time, a systematic theoretical and empirical focus on the role of enmity for military identity/the identity of the military as an organisation is largely absent in scholarship on military identity. This seems surprising in the light of a longstanding and rich strand of research in International Relations scholarship theorizing and studying the role of the constitutive other for collective identity formation. To shed light on to what extent (not) having an enemy affects military identity, this paper studies identity construction in militaries in different historical circumstances and constellations, relying on both document/practice analysis and interviews.
