Forum: Foreign Policy, Emotions and Ontological Security

Fórum: Política externa, emoções e segurança ontológica

Abstract

This forum, as a part of the special issue on New Directions for Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), provides a diversity of answers to the question of how affects and emotions, and the search for ontological security, relate to foreign policy. By foregrounding the various ways to conceive the relationship between foreign policy, ontological security, collective identities, states’ autobiographical narratives, emotions and affective investments, the contributors to this forum examine and chart fruitful directions in FPA. Resende explores the analytical potentials of combining the theory of Ontological Security, Foreign Policy Analysis and Memory Studies to investigate how states invest in practices of ontological security by creating, remaking and defending their national narratives through historical memory. Solomon recollects how the September 11th attacks and the ensuing War on Terror contributed to his search for approaches which took affects and emotions seriously in IR, and which could help make sense of why some discourses, including foreign policy discourses, resonate with and are accepted by the audience in certain contexts. Finally, Sandrin provides an account of her encounters with the literature on the role of emotions in foreign policy and conveys how these texts helped her make sense of some puzzling aspects of Turkish foreign policy. Jimmy Casas Klausen served as lead editor of this forum. The manuscript passed through the regular double-blind peer review process to insure anonymity.

Keywords
Foreign Policy Analysis; emotions; affects; Ontological Security; Memory Studies

Resumo

Este fórum, como parte da edição especial sobre Novas Direções para a Análise de Política Externa (FPA), oferece uma diversidade de respostas à questão de como os afetos e as emoções, e a busca por segurança ontológica, se relacionam com a política externa. Ao colocar em primeiro plano as várias maneiras de conceber a relação entre política externa, segurança ontológica, identidades coletivas, narrativas autobiográficas dos estados, emoções e investimentos afetivos, os colaboradores deste fórum examinam e traçam direções frutíferas na APF. Resende explora os potenciais analíticos da combinação da teoria de Segurança Ontológica, Análise de Política Externa e Estudos de Memória para investigar como os estados investem em práticas de segurança ontológica ao criar, refazer e defender suas narrativas nacionais por meio da memória histórica. Solomon relembra como os ataques de 11 de setembro e a consequente Guerra ao Terror contribuíram para sua busca por abordagens que levassem a sério os afetos e as emoções nas RI e que pudessem ajudar a entender por que alguns discursos, inclusive os de política externa, ressoam e são aceitos pelo público em determinados contextos. Por fim, Sandrin fornece um relato de seus encontros com a literatura sobre o papel das emoções na política externa e transmite como esses textos a ajudaram a entender alguns aspectos intrigantes da política externa turca.

Palavras-chave
Análise de Política Externa; Emoções; Afetos; Segurança Ontológica; Estudos de Memória

Ontological Security, Emotions and Foreign Policy Analysis: A Survey of Key Concepts, Current Debates and Potential New Avenues of Investigation

Erica Simone Almeida Resende

The aim of this short essay, which opens this special Forum on ontological security and emotions in foreign policy, is to provide a brief introductory description of the relevant concepts on the scholarship, identify its current debates, as well as to offer some good examples of the potential of its research program. As both my colleagues in this Forum, I see foreign policy as an inherently social phenomenon. Indeed, in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, as social-constructivist approaches emerged in IR (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; Wendt 1992) as well as in FPA (Campbell 1992; Doty 1993; Weldes 1999), all sorts of new ideas about foreign policy emerged. Departing from a more traditional definition of foreign policy as ‘the sum of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually a state) in international relations,’ (Hill, 2003: 3) but challenging the notion that statehood or threats are objective conditions (Campbell 1992), social-constructivists argued that ideas matter, and ostensibly material facts such as interest are constituted by them (Wendt 1999). This leads to the assumption that foreign policy problems are not objective facts, but rather ‘social constructions forged by state officials in the course of producing and reproducing state identity’ (Weldes 1999: 219).

As Solomon correctly points out in his contribution to this Forum, new FPA approaches – such as those focusing on the role of emotions as well as on ontological security – help us to better understand the politics of collective identities and how they influence foreign policies. In this piece, I argue that foreign policy should be seen also as a tool that allows states to maintain a sense of a reasonably stable self, which enables them to cope in the uncertain and changing world without being paralysed by anxiety (Eberle and Handl 2020). In this regard, I would also want to highlight the potential of combining Ontological Security (OST), Foreign Policy Analysis (FAP) and Memory Studies (MS) by looking into how states invest in practices of ontological security by creating, remaking and defending their national narratives through historical memory, which emerges as a potential new venue of investigation in FPA, and which could be especially fruitful to understand foreign policy change.

The concept of ontological security first originated in psychology with Ronald D. Laing, a psychiatrist who has dedicated his life to the understanding of mental illness, specifically psychosis. He used the term ontological security¹ to characterize the situation in which a person experiences oneself as ‘real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person’ (Laing 1990: 39). Such a sense of ontological security allows one to face the challenges of life head-on and to encounter others and the world from an essentially firm point of view. This feeling of being securely oneself is thereby contingent on recognition and congruence between subjectively felt and externally ascribed identity (Laing 1990: 35-37), which in turn validates each person’s self and makes relating to others potentially gratifying. We seek ontological security because we need to experience ourselves as full, sovereign beings, capable of engaging in relations with others, of conducting a normal life.

Decades later, Anthony Giddens imported the concept into sociology to describe how individuals can only be ontological secure if certain elements are taken for granted, which he called ‘natural attitudes.’ Giddens claimed that the natural attitude, which is never a given, but rather constructed intersubjectively, ‘brackets out questions about ourselves, others and the object-world which have to be taken for granted in order to keep on with everyday activity’ (Giddens 1991: 37). He goes on to define ontological security in terms of an individual possessing ‘on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, “answers” to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses’ (1991: 47).

As a result, Giddens (1991: 37–41, 52–54) stresses the importance of routines as well as narratives of self-biography to construct the sense of our own ‘being’. By acknowledging how ‘feelings of ontological security [as] characteristic of large segments of human activity in all cultures’ (Giddens 1991: 36) make up the stuff of what we normally assume and take for granted to keep on living, Giddens indirectly points to how ontological insecurity describes the situation in which individuals are unable to keep on living a normal life. Hence individuals facing ontological insecurity experience such a debilitating level of anxiety that they develop phobias or compulsions (1991: 45, 105-107). They have a difficult time functioning in society.

According to Ejdus (2018: 884), Giddens’ spin on Laing’s concept of ontological security ‘quickly spread into the social sciences’, and the field of IR was no different.² Ejdus explains how it was imported into IR by two generations of scholarship. While the first generation, developed during the 1990s, did not build a theory or even empirically tested its explanatory potential,³ the second generation – working a decade later – has made more systematic efforts towards theory building and empirical case studies, giving rise to what is commonly known today as OST (Edjus 2018: 885). Indeed, scholars such as Kinnvall (2004), Mitzen (2006a, 2006b), Steele (2008), Delehanty and Steele (2009), Zarakol (2010), Croft (2012), Kay (2012), Lupovici (2012), Alexandra Innes and Steele (2013), Chacko (2014), Gustafsson (2014), Rumelili (2015), and Subotic (2016) helped carve a concept into a broader theoretical framework connected to both security studies and FPA.

In a nutshell, OST is based on the notion that states do not only pursue physical survival, as realists would argue, but also strive for ontological security (Steele 2008: 3). According to Mitzen, as ‘[a]ll actors require a stable sense of who they are […] ontological security is a prime drive in every social actor’ (2006a: 272), and routines help individuals to ‘bring our threat environment under cognitive control’ (Mitzen (2006a: 273). Here she goes back to Giddens, who postulated that the ‘maintenance of habits and routines is a crucial bulwark against threatening anxieties’ (Giddens 1991: 39).

Similar to Mitzen’s focus on the effect of routines, others have opted to focus on how narratives help create the same sense of cognitive control amid uncertainty. Berenskoetter and Giegerich (2010: 420), for example, argue that narratives contain basic principles that are ‘affirmed through corresponding practices.’ Biographical narratives provide these communities with ‘a sense of being in the world by situating them in an experienced space and an envisioned space, ordered from a particular place and delineated through horizons of experience and of possibility, respectively’ (Berenskoetter 2014: 282). From this we may understand how these narratives function as sources for state security, guiding states in their interactions with one another. Hence, states reflexively create a stable, autobiographical narrative in order to provide themselves with ontological security (Oppermann and Hansel 2019). In a similar venue, Steele (2008: 3) shifts the focus from practices to the discourses that shape ‘a narrative which gives life to routinized foreign policy actions’. This manoeuvre has allowed OST to explore how states establish and ground their own identity and thus achieve ontological security.

Central to OST is the notion of anxiety. In contrast to fear, another key emotion in IR as Thomas Hobbes has long ago reminded us, and which is projected towards external objects such as terrorists, foreigners, immigrants or any other threatening Others, anxiety stems from the subject’s limits of knowledge and mortality (Subotic and Edjus 2021). According to Rumelili (2021), who draws on Heidegger for her argument, anxiety is the basis of all other affective experiences, thus a ‘constitutive condition’ for IR. Also agreeing on anxiety being a constitutive element of international politics, Steele (2021: 1041) claims that anxiety is a ‘deeper condition than the ordering principle of anarchy [emphasis in the original]’, and that states manage it through securitisation, routines, expertise or ideology. Both Rumelili (2021) and Steele (2021) claim that anxiety makes individuals more receptive to securitization⁴. For Gustafsson (2021), IR – both as theory and as practice – tends to be preoccupied with reducing anxiety through the production of routines directed towards the creation of manageable objects of fear. At the core of these considerations, sits the notion that high levels of anxiety disturb our sense of being in the world, thus making us ontologically insecure.

Most of the work published in OST is engaged in a debate centred on the question of who is the ontological security-seeking entity. That is, who precisely seeks ontological security: citizens and policy makers (individuals), or states as social actors themselves? As Edjus (2018: 4) correctly points out, this is ‘essentially a debate about the appropriate unit of analysis between state-centric and individual-centric perspectives.’ Albeit developed at its origins in psychology having individuals in mind, OST has from the very outset been applied to states. While authors such as Mitzen, Steele, Zarakol, Rumelili and others opted for anthropomorphising collective actors such as states – and hence treating them as the unit of analysis within OST –, others have pointed out the fragility of this option. Alana Krolikowski (2008: 111) argues that ‘resorting to the assumption of state personhood obscures important aspects of how the state, as an evolving institution, affects individuals’ sense of ontological security’. Similarly, Paul Roe (2008) claims that just because states are providers of individual ontological security, it doesn’t follow that like persons, states too can have the need to be ontologically secure.

Notwithstanding the multiple works that have contributed to the consolidation of OST during the last two decades or so, there remains a remarkable vagueness or broad variety of interpretations when it comes to some of the core concepts of OST, such as the role of anxiety and crisis⁵, the fragility of anthropomorphising the state, treating it as if it were an individual, among other things. Undeniable, however, is the acknowledgement that the concept of ontological security is particularly interesting in IR. Firstly, OST allows us to think about security in ways that differ from conventional IR theory, particularly realism. As Kinnvall and Mitzen (2017: 2) point out, not only it

[D]raws attention to other types of action as security-seeking – habitual as much as intentional, routines and rhetoric as much as behavior –, but it also suggests that if the actors in world politics seek ontological as much as physical security, then conflict and war might result from different pathways, and be maintained through dynamics, than those IR scholarship has recognised thus far.

Secondly, OST focuses attention on the relationship between uncertainty, anxiety, and the capacity to maintain a stable sense of self amid chaos, that is, to be able to cope and go on with our normal lives despite the escalation of violence and conflict. Since all social actors need a stable sense of self in order to realise a sense of agency, managing that fundamental anxiety is an ongoing project for all. Thirdly, OST allows us to think about how ‘security as being’ is as important as – if not more than – ‘security as survival’ in terms of agency in world politics.

In order to feel secured-as-being, and thus experience continuity, stability, and coherence, the state engages itself in a permanent process of creating and recreating a narrative about its origins, its coming-into-being, within its own borders, differentiating itself from the chaos outside its national limits. In this sense, biographical narratives are inseparable from historical remembrance: which story is being told and by whom matters as a national security issue. As a result, the state creates, ultimately, a biographical self-narrative that requires constant enactment, confirmation, and reproduction.

As in any case of storytelling, however, state narratives will always include tensions and contradictions that political agents will try to hide – no matter how carefully constructed they are. These tensions and contradictions, however, can be revealed by others, triggering the contestation of story lines and, by extension, insecurities (Berenskoetter 2014). What is ‘our’ narrative, ‘our’ past, is viewed as being completely misunderstood and distorted by the ‘others’ whose own vision of the past is seen as a danger to ‘our’ existence. It becomes critical to defend ‘our’ memory, which is essential to the survival of ‘our’ state. And when threatened by a crisis, states respond by narrative adjustment that highlights continuity at some levels, while enabling change at other levels. This dynamic becomes especially relevant in contexts where the hegemonic narrative becomes threatened, and memory is securitised (Malksoo 2015).

This is how collective memory comes to play.⁶ The shared memories held by a community about the past, as well as the subjective image of the past constructed by political actors in the present based on a community’s current social and historical necessities (Hunt 2010; Pakier and Strath 2010), are used by political actors to help explain and justify the pursuit of foreign policy objectives.⁷ Building on previous work on the role of memory in IR (Müller 2002; Bell 2006; Langenbacher and Shain 2010; Resende and Budryte 2013), recent developments in OST have produced exciting new work dedicated to the study of connection between foreign policy-making and the uses of the past. This scholarship focuses on the application of historical analogies, the construction of historical (self/autobiographical) state narratives, the creation of memory sites, the marginalization and forgetting of the past, as well as the securitisation of historical memory. Due to the limits and scope of this forum, I shall briefly mention a couple of recent works that exemplify this emerging scholarship and point to the potential of an emerging research agenda in connecting OST, FPA and MS.

For example, Gustaffson (2014) has demonstrated that war memory in victimised states is also highly relevant for bilateral relations, since it is closely connected to ‘ontological security’, or the ‘security of identity.’ By analysing Chinese official documents and Japanese parliamentary debates, he shows how the Chinese government has used representations of the past for ontological security purposes, and how in response Japanese political actors have politicised exhibits at Chinese war museums that are seen as a threat to Japanese identity and interests.

Analysing Serbia’s changing foreign policy behaviour regarding the disputed status of Kosovo, Subotic (2016) built on OST and narrative analysis to examine ways in which state autobiographical narratives are used by political actors to confront state insecurities. She argues that at times of great crises, narratives are selectively activated to provide a cognitive bridge between policy change that resolves the physical security challenge, while also preserving state ontological security through offering autobiographical continuity, a sense of routine, familiarity, and calm.

Looking at German foreign policy towards Russia between 2008 and 2014, Eberle and Handl (2020) developed a three-layered model conceptualizing ontological security through narratives about the self, a significant other, and the international system, and show its particular relevance for explicating policy change. When threatened by a crisis, the authors argue, states respond by narrative adjustment that highlights continuity on some levels, while enabling change on other levels.

Finally, in a recent article, Narozhna(2021) offered a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between changing collective identity and foreign policy. Looking at recent changes in post-Soviet Russian foreign policy, she argues that the underlying impetus for changes in identity and foreign policy is the need for ontological security. States experience a strong sense of ontological security from the confluence of reflexive and social aspects of identity, suggesting that an ontologically secure Self is also a recognised Self, she argues. Therefore, ontological security-seeking at the state, societal and individual levels is susceptible to international recognition. Hence negotiating external recognition will prompt the state to pursue foreign policies with external recognition claims, and with a relative higher agential autonomy, employing strategies that minimize misrecognition and ontological insecurity.

At the same time, while states – be they conceptualized as collectives or anthropomorphized – have a desire to a coherent, consistent narrative of the national Self, this does not mean that there won’t be any contestations of that narrative, and such contestations will affect foreign policy behaviour. Budryte (2018) explores the rise of a hegemonic discourse associated with anti-Soviet partisans in both Ukraine and Lithuania after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when new discourses about anti-Soviet partisans challenged old discourses about the ‘Great Patriotic War.’ Eventually these discourses about the anti-Soviet partisans became state supported discourses, rising to a hegemonic status after 1991. She claims that both Ukraine and Lithuania have been creating biographical narratives that include accounts of anti-Soviet resistance fighters, and today these narratives are seen as sources of security and guides in interactions with other states. Along similar lines, Buhari-Gulmez (2018) investigates the role of diasporas in contesting dominant national discourses. Looking into the case of Crimean Tatars within the context of Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, she highlights the role of the Tatarian diaspora in Turkey in contesting Russian claims in Crimea against Crimean Tatars.

As for the other emerging opportunities for new work in OS and FPA, a recent call for an ‘Existentialist Turn’ in IR made by Subotic and Edjus (2021) offers plenty of food for thought in this regard. Can states express anxiety? If so, how would it manifest itself in ways that are observable and identifiable? And how does it reflect in foreign policy choices and strategies? Is anxiety, in this sense, universal? What is the relationship between anxiety and fear pursuant IR theory? Do political communities experience anxiety differently? If so, would their external behaviour, in coherence with OST, present itself differently to those with much higher levels of anxiety? Is there a link between anxiety and the emergence of populism, securitization discourse, and hence deepening of violence and conflict in world politics? And, taking a cue from Zevnik (2021), could anxiety have an emancipatory effect in world politics?

Concluding remarks

Born in psychology, imported into sociology, and introduced more or less recently in IR, OST is another evolving field in critical security studies.⁸ As Stuart Croft correctly (2012: 223) notes, ‘it has become as multidisciplinary work space’. Overall, these debates in OST focus on the practices through which agents order their environments and their Selves in an environment under constant pressure of uncertainty, chaos and speed so characteristic of the so-called late modernity. In a world made of permanent crisis and instability, social actors suffer as they try to keep up with an ever-evolving world as they strive for stability in their sense of being. As states look for ontological security, foreign policy presents itself as a privileged instance to increase, maintain, and secure it. As a result, foreign policy should be seen as a tool that allows states to maintain a sense of a reasonably stable self, which enables them to cope in the changing world.

A burgeoning scholarship connecting OST and FPA has proven that there is a lot of room for innovative, creative work to be explored in our field. Not only this scholarship takes to discussion about the politics of state identity to a higher level, it also helps expanding our own understanding of the non-material dimensions of foreign policy objectives, as well as the limits of the very discipline by differentiating security-as-being from security-as-survival. And more specifically, with the increasing engagement of both OST and FPA with MS, there is ample potential for furthering the discipline’s understanding of how states behave in an ever changing, uncertain, brave new world.

9/11, Emotions, and Foreign Policy: A Brief Reflection

Ty Solomon

I was nowhere near New York or Washington D.C. on the morning of 11 September 2001. Yet it was one of the (thankfully) very few times in my life that I felt genuine fear in the pit of my stomach. I was at my job in the university library that day as an undergraduate, and my colleagues and I were listening on the radio and then watching on television and online the horror as it unfolded, and as speculations mounted of the number of deaths that were occurring that morning, that heavy feeling dropped in my stomach. I watched the smoke billow from the towers, along with everyone else in the library, silent and dumbstruck. I felt afraid not because I or anyone I knew was in immediate danger, but because of a then still-inchoate sense that ‘my nation’ had been attacked. This pulsated alongside worry about how ‘my nation’ would respond and who would be victims of the violence to be unleashed by ‘my nation.’ I called my father that morning, just to reach out.

I did not realize it at the time, but experiencing the events of 9/11 as I did shifted me onto a new path. Looking back, I’ve since found that autoethnographic approaches in IR have offered useful insights into understanding how my personal subjectivity was constructed in ways I was not fully aware of at the time. One of the main aims in autoethnographic work is indeed to help scholars ‘consciously reflect on the ways in which historical experience led them to redefine their own view on the relationship between history and individual life’ (Popkin 2005: 58-59). I later came to recognize how autoethnography can help provide new knowledge about general social structures and conditions in ways that more detached and ‘objective’ methods eschew (Lowenheim 2010: 1025). Yet alongside this commitment to more lived sources to knowledge generation, I also employ an autoethnographic approach here as an author ‘who can understand her/himself through thinking about social institutions, practices, and phenomena’ (Lowenheim 2010: 1025). In writing this brief reflective account, I hope to join others whose goal has been to ‘move the field of International Relations towards greater candidness about how personal narratives influence theoretical articulations’ (Inayatullah 2010: 6). Autoethnographic research helped me see the embedding of that fear in the pit of my stomach within the broader constellation of micro and macro processes of cultural, national, and racial politics within which I existed.

A few years after 9/11, I was in a PhD program in political science in the United States and was working on a dissertation which used discourse theory to study the War on Terror. I was immersed in many of the critical works on the topic from the time, such as Edkins (2003), Jackson (2005), Croft (2006), and many others. I began a PhD to study constructivism, and specifically identity, in International Relations (IR). I had the sense that identity was the best concept available to grapple with what I saw happen in the USA in the months and years after 9/11, the lead up to the Iraq War, and afterwards. Watching the whirlwinds of nationalism, xenophobia, hubris, anxiety, and fear within the USA during those years, poststructuralist approaches to identity and identification made the most analytical sense in helping me understand the complex links between the kinds of language then circulating in American society, the tropes and narratives that became the ‘common sense’ of the time, and American actions abroad.

Yet, the more I read that literature, and the more I reflected on the landscape of post-9/11 American foreign relations, the more dissatisfied I became. It seemed to me that while discourse theory was useful in thinking about the constitutive power of language, it offered less help in answering the question of why some discourses became ‘common sense’ while others did not. Why was the notion of a global ‘war on terror’ widely accepted by most Americans? The literature did offer an answer of sorts. In discourse theoretical approaches, there are always battles for discursive hegemony, and the discourse that ‘won’ then became solidified as society’s ‘common sense’ (Croft 2006).

Yet, it seemed like there was much more to these discursive battles than the literature acknowledged. I wagered that a key missing element in our understanding of discourse and discursive contestation was emotion and affect. I also suspected that those discourses that become relatively hegemonic were those that more effectively constructed and channelled audiences’ affective investments in the positions of subjectivity that they explicitly and implicitly offered to audiences. In other words, discourses that offered what seemed like sensible understandings of what it meant to be a ‘good’ or ‘patriotic American’ were powerful enticements to American audiences to see themselves as part of the story that the ‘war on terror’ discourse offered. Here I followed others who had recently began focusing on emotions in global politics, such as Crawford (2000), Bleiker and Hutchison (2008), Ross (2006), Fattah and Fierke (2009), and Mercer (2006), among others. I wondered if, but more likely how, that fear in the pit of my stomach years before shaped my views and sense of self. I wanted to stay with the importance and power of discourse, but also wanted to develop a new form of discourse theory and analysis that could, however imperfectly and partially, capture the aspects of discourse that affectively resonated with audiences.

My aim in the dissertation, and later developed more fully in my first book (Solomon2015), was to show that there were deeply affective dimensions to the discursive dominance of the War on Terror, and that this was rooted in how audiences’ affectively-invested subjectivities were tied to broader discourses of American collective identity. These affective investments and attachments to the discourse, in turn, helped to create the conditions of possibility for and to thus pave the way for the Iraq War. In this sense, developing this framework allowed me to begin to think about how discourse and affect mutually infuse each other, and how this co-infusion helped to make some sense of the emotional appeal of discourse not only during the War on Terror, but also discourse as a more general concept in understanding global politics.

The study of emotions has become widespread across IR, as well as a clear research agenda in the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). There are many groundbreaking contributions that this research has made, too many to list here. In terms of the study of foreign policy specifically, there are two that I would like to highlight, given their closeness to my own interests and previous work. First, a focus on emotions helps us to better understand the politics of collective identities and how they influence foreign policies. Specifically, emotions offer an explanation for how some identities are powerful or influential. Identity has long been a core concept for IR researchers, and the relationship between identity and foreign policy is well-established (Campbell 1998; Hansen 2006). From how states choose to develop (or not) nuclear weapons (Hymans 2006), conflict negotiations (Sasley 2010), how certain terms come to embody state values (Koschut 2018), or how emotional interactions between diplomats shape outcomes (Holmes and Wheeler 2020), the nexus between emotions and identity and its influence on foreign relations is increasingly of interest.

Yet, every state has multiple identities within its political culture, and this multiplicity is at play within any national context. These identities are often not only clustered around traditional political spectrums of left and right, but also cross-cutting in ways that may confound the conventional ways that we tend to map identities onto groups. The United Kingdom’s (UK) decision to leave the European Union is one example of this. To be sure, some identities, and their emotional underpinnings, can be mapped along the left-right spectrum as it exists in the UK context. Conservative politicians and voters tended to be more supportive of ‘Brexit’ than did more left parties and voters. However, this is also painting with an analytically broad brush across what was and continues to be complex emotional movements across the traditional left and right spectrum. Many different ideas about British national identity were contested during the Brexit referendum and its aftermath: Britain as a model democracy, and what this meant in its relationship to Europe, Britain as a great power, Britain as part of the ‘Anglosphere,’ Britain as an economic power, and so on. These different identities crisscrossed in different ways across different constituencies. Exploring not just the collective identities at play during Brexit but also the various emotions underpinning them holds promise for better understanding the power of identities and the factors that allow them to shape foreign relations.

Second, emotions can offer compelling explanations for how mobilization happens behind different policies and political projects. Among the public, emotional responses to events can mobilize groups of people around a political agenda and generate new demands for action by their leaders. Even if public emotions do not mirror elite decision-makers’ emotions, they nevertheless create a context that influences decision-makers (Dolan 2018). Hall and Ross’s (2015) model of bottom-up, lateral, and top-down emotional movements can create ‘affective waves’ which can create affective solidarities across groups. Van Rythoven (2015) demonstrates how public emotions shape perceptions of elite legitimacy which constrain their ability to securitize issues. Pearlman (2013) shows how emotions such as hope and anger can mobilize populations to revolution and resistance against state authority. The large literature on public opinion and foreign policy also sometimes explores the role of emotions in supporting or opposing particular policies.

Yet, even while much of this important work rightly explores how emotions work to spark support or opposition to policies, this emotional support or opposition always takes place within broader trends and character of public debate. Specifically, there are emotional and aesthetic tones and atmospheres within which public support or opposition emerges. These emotional and aesthetic tones of public debates are not usually captured by public opinion surveys, or even more critical methods such as discourse analysis. Rather, affective atmospheres or national moods (Ringmar 2018) often constitute or shape the background affective conditions against which public debates take place. Different public moods may elicit different feelings and meanings from similar discourses. Right-wing British discourses railing against the EU found more resonance during times of general heightened anger, anxiety, and resentment than during other times when different national moods prevailed. Public moods on some issues can be captured by surveys. Yet their aesthetic tones and atmospheric background feelings are often more likely to be grappled with through more artistic or ethnographic methods (Merrill et al. 2020). Turning the study of emotions and foreign policy towards these more atmospheric and aesthetic contexts within which discourses about public policy circulate holds much promise for a fuller understanding of the sources of and support for state actions.

Finally, I’ll close this autoethnographic reflection with a question for potential future research. While the literature on emotions and foreign policy is now well-established, much work often tends to focus on the importance and role of clear, singular emotions and how they affect foreign relations. This parallels a trend in some of the broader popular literature on emotions and contemporary politics in recent years. Discussions about an ‘age of Anger’ (Mishra 2018), for example, epitomizes in some ways attempts to reckon with the so-called populist era of Trump and Brexit. Yet, often times it appears that such politics are not driven by a single emotion but rather constellations of emotions and affects working together and amplifying each other in different ways. So, a question going forward for emotions and foreign policy, and broader IR researchers, is how do different kinds of emotions come to solidify or challenge dominant identities and discourses? While anger has no doubt driven much of Britain’s Brexit politics, it was far from the only discernible emotion present in public debates. Historical nostalgia of empire, economic frustrations with globalization, anxieties around multiculturalism, frustrations around perceived senses of fairness, along with a host of other issues (Closs Stephens 2019) have been argued to be key emotional drivers of Brexit. Focusing on the various emotions at play in such complex situations, rather than single emotions and beyond strictly interests, (mis)perceptions, or broad systemic incentives can offer a much richer portrait of how emotions relate to multiple collective identities, but also how they influence politics beyond an identity framework (Ross 2014).

It is likely the case that discrete emotions, however seemingly dominant, are almost always working in conjunction with and shading into other emotions. In this sense, adopting assemblage theories (Acuto and Curtis 2014) for the study of emotions and foreign policy would likely prove promising. Exploring how different heterogenous elements such as collective emotions, contested discourses, varying intensities, public tones of debate, and their circulation through social media come together in different ways at different times would highlight some complexities surrounding emotions and foreign policy that have thus far been downplayed.

On Becoming Stuck: Turkish Attachments to EU Membership Bid

Paula Sandrin

In my piece in this Forum, I would like to explore how the growing body of work on the role of emotions in foreign policy constitutes a promising new direction for Foreign Policy Analysis by recounting my journey of encounters with this field of studies. As my colleague Solomon in this Forum, I believe autoethnographic approaches in IR can help us understand how personal experiences, always structured by historical contexts, impact on theoretical articulations. Knowledge production is not a detached and ‘objective’ activity, but intersubjective, always situated within an individual’s history of encounters, which are conditioned by particular international, political, economic, social and cultural contexts. In this piece, I want to discuss some of the analytical possibilities advanced by the literature on the role of emotions in foreign policy from the impressions it made on me: impressions in the sense that this literature impressed me, left marks or traces on me, and caused me impressions of it. By using these terms, I already begin to present part of my journey through this field.

I borrowed these terms from Sara Ahmed’s book The Cultural Politics of Emotions, from a passage in which she describes what she means by emotions: bodily processes of affecting and being affected by contact with other beings, human and non-human, how beings are impressed (this term is from David Hume): how they leave impressions on each other (how affections leave marks, traces) and create impressions (beliefs, having an impression of others). But my journey through this literature did not begin with the reading of Ahmed, but with the reading of the book The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses by Solomon (2015), a fellow contributor of this Forum. Before I recount how this book impressed me, affected me, moved me, made me change (research) direction, I would like to recount what I was doing before my encounter with this book.

In my master’s and doctoral studies, I studied different aspects of the relations between Turkey and the European Union. At the time, 2006, the European Union had just frozen chapters of the negotiations for Turkey’s membership in the bloc and it was a hot topic. I started reading about Turkey and became absolutely fascinated by the country, with its tragic history of consecutive wars, of loss of empire, of trying to insert itself on an equal footing in a hierarchical international system, of trying to forge new bases for a state in formation, of suppressing difference – whether through population exchange (of people of Greek origin), genocide (of the Armenian population) or epistemicide (of the Kurds) –, of disputes over the soul of the country (Western, secular and homogeneous; Eastern, Islamic and heterogeneous; other configurations).

I was struck by the intensity of suffering, by the inability to deal with and resolve past and present sufferings, by the always unsuccessful search for a direction, an identity, a recognition from this Western/European other that never came. The country has been trying to become part of the European community since 1959, an expectation that has been continuously frustrated. Eastern European countries, which during the Cold War were considered enemies, enemies that Turkey helped to contain as a NATO member, passed in front of her, were admitted to the club and she was not. These frustrations generated resentment and hatred of this other considered so unfair and hypocritical, but still so admired. And despite these constant frustrations and expressions of insult, Turkish political actors from across the political spectrum, from leftist Kemalists to neo-liberal Islamists, persisted in the membership project, unable to give up a long-suffering quest of more than half a century. I wanted to make sense of all this in my graduate studies, but the more I read, the more dissatisfied I got with the available literature on Turkey’s enduring quest to become a member of the EU.

Most accounts of Turkey’s membership bid argued that Turkish actors supported EU membership because it promised political and material gains, such as the empowerment of certain (political and societal) actors at the expense of other (military) actors (Ozcan 2009; Onis 2010) and an improved Turkish economy (Aydin 2003; Onis 2010), through access to the EU single-market, pre-accession funds and Foreign Direct Investment, or because historical processes had tied Turkish policymakers into domestic and foreign policies oriented towards the West, which became further entrenched due to increasing returns or positive feedbacks (such as financial and military aid) received from the West/Europe/EU (Camyar and Tagma 2010).

I felt something was missing, since the history of Turkey-EU relations, from the point of view of Turkish actors, had also been marked by plenty of negative feedback, frustration and pain. I felt the emphasis on carrots and sticks, material incentives, structural pressures and cost-benefit analyses was unable to capture ‘something’ that I felt was very important, but I did not yet have the vocabulary to capture. I had not yet assimilated a theoretical, conceptual, methodological framework that would allow me to analyse the persistence of Turkey’s EU accession project centred on Turkey’s ambivalent affective investments in ideals of West and Europe. I completed my PhD by analysing Turkey’s potential impacts on European Union foreign policy, using a constructivist framework and the concept of security cultures, which took into account historical processes of constructing foreign and security policy identities and preferences. What had actually impressed me in my encounters with Turkey was not explored in my thesis. That would have to wait.

Years later, a colleague of mine recommended me Solomon’s book, which combined a Lacanian framework with the discourse analysis of Ernesto Laclau to analyse why particular discourses about the War on Terror became more politically effective than others. As I was reading the book, I began to get the feeling that this would constitute a watershed moment in my academic research. I was particularly impressed by the questions Solomon asked in the book: why did certain discourses (in that case, about the War on Terror), and not others, not only became dominant (for this, we could use post-structuralism, referring to the power relations that lead certain discourses to become hegemonic and others to be marginalized and silenced), but resonated, appealed, were accepted by the audience, invested with affects by the audience?

This encounter with Solomon’s text moved me towards other readings. I came across the writings of many people who were also bringing insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis to IR: Jenny Edkins (2003), Catarina Kinnvall (2018; 2019), Jakub Eberle (2017; 2019), Andreja Zevnik (2016), Marco Vieira (2017), Charlotte Epstein (2010, 2013), Moran Mandelbaum (2020), among many others. I found that in addition to Lacanians, there were a lot of people in IR studying affect and emotions from other approaches as well: neuroscience, social psychology, Spinozian and Deleuzian philosophy, so it was possible to talk about an emotional turn in IR. From all these readings, I began to wonder if what was missing in analyses of Turkey’s EU membership quest was the emotional appeal of the prospect of EU membership, deeply held affective investments and attachments towards the EU which helped to create the conditions of possibility for Turkey’s enduring quest.

But something still puzzled me. Since early Republican years, Turkish political actors’ discourses about Europe and the West have been ambivalent, as Bilgiç (2016), Bilgin (2009, 2017), Bilgin and Bilgiç (2012), Zarakol (2010, 2011), and Gülsah Çapan and Zarakol (2017) have demonstrated:

[O]n the one hand, these discourses are infused with desire (to be like Europe/the West, to be accepted as a full member of Europe/the West), admiration (of European/Western civilization, politics, economy, rationality, science), suspicion (of European/Western hypocrisy, double standards, aggression, intrusiveness), anxiety (about being devalued and the consequences of devaluation) and resentment (for never achieving the recognition Turkey aims for) (Sandrin 2020: 2).

In Turkish discourses, therefore, EU/Europe seemed to stand for a desired and desirable signifier with which Turkish political actors would like to identify, which promised, in psychoanalytical language, discursive stability and consistency, wholeness and completeness, and, simultaneously, a signifier which prevented all these desires from being achieved and was, thus, resented for it. How could desire and resentment co-exist towards the same signifiers EU/Europe? Why did Turkish political actors of different political orientations, even some who appeared very frustrated, angry and resentful of the EU, seemed to continuously desire acceptance and recognition from the EU? Why didn’t they just give up on this frustrating and painful quest, redirect the country’s foreign policy and reinvest its affects in other objects? Were the carrots that enticing? They didn’t seem to feel so according to most of my interlocutors.

Then another encounter impressed me, affected me, pushed me in other directions. In one of my undergraduate courses which began to incorporate some of the literature on affect and emotions in IR, a student suggested that we read the book Tornar-se Negro [Becoming Black], by Neusa Santos Souza, a black Brazilian psychoanalyst, published in 1983. In this book, Santos Souza investigated the psychic effects of racism on Black Brazilians experiencing upward mobility. Santos Souza led me to other authors who analysed processes of subject constitution in contexts marked by coloniality and racism. Through her, I found Fanon (2008), Memmi (2003), Nandy (1983), among others. In IR, I read Ilan Kapoor, who masterfully brings postcolonialism and psychoanalysis together. These authors did not discard psychoanalysis completely but digested it and produced something new from it.

These authors used psychoanalytic concepts to understand the formation of colonized and racialized subjects, the psychic effects of colonization and racism, the consequent psychic sufferings, and the possibilities of resistance. They showed the deep ambivalences of the colonized and racialized, who may seek identification with the aggressor in order to survive materially, symbolically, and psychically, who may cling to signifiers valued by the symbolic order, who may internalize an inferiority complex, who may detest and yet desire recognition from those who stigmatize, devalue, degrade them. They helped me understand the distinction between the frustration experienced in all processes of subject formation and the psychic violence and injury sustained in the processes of identification in extremely hierarchical contexts.

I finally felt I had the tools to make sense of Turkish attachment to the West, to Europe, to the European Union, even in the face of so much frustration and suffering. Although Turkey was never colonized, the Ottoman Empire and the Republic were stigmatized and devalued, suffered interventions, criticisms, scrutiny, and sought a place in a hierarchical and racist international order by identifying with valued signifiers associated with the West/Europe. In spite of countless attempts to ‘catch up’ with these signifiers, the desired recognition has never been achieved, leading to resentment. As a result, throughout the country’s traumatic and painful encounters with European/international society, symptomatic and wounded attachments to Europe/EU were developed and crystallized. These attachments, although painful and unpleasant in several respects, also provide ‘pleasure in displeasure’: such as the sustenance of a sense of self and ‘more or less comfortable, complacently miserable position as subjected by the Other’ (Fink 1996: 72, 73). Of course, the sustenance of relations that are conflictive, violent, dangerous, or harmful is also the focus of the literature on ontological security. As argued by Mitzen (2006), giving up routine relationships, no matter how unpleasant, can bring great anxiety, because it could destabilize one’s sense of self.

It is important to add that the subjected position not only stabilizes a sense of self, however precariously, but also brings libidinal gratifications. In the case of Turkey, ‘in comparison with the insincere, hypocritical, unreliable, unfair Europe/EU, the country comes across as sincere, truthful, reliable and fair. What emerges is a coherent, consistent and virtuous Turkey’ (Sandrin 2020: 21). In other words, these symptomatic and wounded attachments have been structuring subjectivities and socio-political realities for more than a century. Giving up on them is not easy. Giving up would mean undoing a version of the self which is saturated with affects, including the version of virtuous self continuously pushed around and passed over. The enticing carrot, so to speak, was constituted not only by political and material returns, but by affective returns as well.

My journey of encounters with the literature on the role of emotions in foreign policy, including psychoanalytical and postcolonial approaches, not only allowed me to deal with a long-lasting personal puzzlement. They allowed me to discover other ways to do Foreign Policy Analysis and showed me that foreign policy is much more than what common sense or mainstream approaches to IR lead us to believe. Together with post-structuralist approaches such as Campbell’s (1998) and Hansen’s (2006), they showed me how foreign policy is one practice among many that serves to discipline internal ambiguity and difference and construct states’ identities. Beyond post-structuralist approaches, they showed me how identities (re)produced by foreign policy also constitute anchoring points for the production of subjectivities and for the quest for ontological security, becoming, thus, affectively invested. It is possible to become ‘stuck’ in certain foreign policy courses due to (material, symbolic and affective) transnational forces which structure social-political realities, limit foreign policy options and constitute subjectivities saturated with affects. Becoming ‘unstuck’ involves not only charting a new foreign policy course through a dispassionate analysis of domestic and international pressures and opportunities. It also involves reckoning with passionate attachments, something which is not easy to do, because dissolving attachments also means dissolving strongly held versions of the self.

Notes

• 1
  Laing claimed that he opted to use the term ‘ontological security’ because it appeared to be the best expression derivative of ‘being’ for he wanted to understand how ontological insecurity could lead to incapacity for a person.
• 2
  For a critique on the ‘sociological spin’ given by Giddens and how it carried on into IR, see Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi (2020).
• 3
  Wendt (1994), Huysmans (1998) and McSweeney (1999) are good examples.
• 4
  As pointed out by Subotic and Edjus (2021: 1016), this argument is relevant not only for OST and securitisation theory, but for critical security studies as a whole, as it reveals ‘a derivative function of securitisation, and shed light on its deep socio-psychological drivers, which may help us explain the well-known but poorly understood difficulties of overcoming the logic of security in world politics’.
• 5
  For a recent set of articles on the role of anxiety in IR, see the Symposium on Anxiety, in Journal of International Relations and Development, volume 24, issue 4, December 2021.
• 6
  For reference works on collective memory and the uses of memory, see Halbwachs (1992) and Ricoeur (2004).
• 7
  It is important here to differentiate historical reconstruction from collective memory. While the former is concerned with recuperating ‘how it really happened’, the latter makes moral claims and prompts pollical actions, and often needs to be corrected by historical knowledge (Müller 2002: 13-19, 22-25).
• 8
  For further debates in OST, see two recent special issues edited by Kinnvall and Mitzen (2017) and Kinnvall, Manners, and Mitzen (2018).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 Nov 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  18 Mar 2022
• Accepted
  24 Feb 2023