Description
This article investigates how NATO has responded to disruptions in the global nuclear regime by activating and deactivating a series of narrative genres to restore its ontological security. Combining insights from critical regime theory and the Lacanian ontological security perspective, the paper breaks with traditional notions of international regimes as tools for ensuring stability or managing power. It rather conceptualizes nuclear regime as a symbolic order that NATO relies on to legitimize its fantasy of a responsible nuclear alliance despite its contradictory commitment to both deterrence and disarmament. Tracing the Alliance’s official texts from 1949 to 2025 through a structural narrative analysis, the paper reveals four narrative emplotments (romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire) that NATO has invoked to mask and stabilize its fractured identity. By acting as stabilizing ‘fantasies’, these narratives have concealed the symbolic ‘lack’ in NATO’s nuclear identity over the years. This paper has contributed to both ontological security and critical regime perspectives by demonstrating how collective actors struggle to maintain identity through narrative and fantasy rather than material stability or institutional coherence.
Keywords: NATO, ontological security, Lacan, critical regime theory, global nuclear regime, structural narrative analysis
