Description
In analyses of security policy, discourse has largely been used either to explain continuity by pointing to security cultures and discursive constraints to policy formulation or to critically engage with practices of othering and the construction (and reproduction) of (mostly national) identities. I argue that we need to pay more attention to the performativity of security discourse in the construction of and stabilisation of societal orders through the articulation of antagonistic frontiers and discursive nodal points. Acknowledging earlier Foucauldian work on security, I thus treat "security" as an empty signifier that requires connections to other concepts in order to become meaningful. Through these linkages, a particular vision of society is inscribed into the broader debate as a given so that security becomes a "technology of power". What has been discussed as a process of "securitisation" in the literature, i.e. the discursive process of moving an issue from the realm of politics to the realm of security, may thus be reconceptualised as a particularly strong form of fixing the meaning of "society", in which the articulations of threats, referent objects and emergency measures serve as the rhetorical vehicles to inscribe particular metanarratives. Security policy is therefore never only about security; it affects many aspects of our daily lives. Likewise, security policy does not only emerge from particular societal contexts but serves to construct these contexts. And while othering is an essential part of security discourse, it becomes effective only through the linkage with the construction of what is considered essential for society. As an illustration, I will provide a brief analysis of debates within the EU about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in which articulations of security serve to construct different "Europes" as referent objects tied to different conceptions of the essential pillars of (a) European order.
