9
by (i) incorporating prestige or ‘status’ (the term used here) as the referent object and, as a
consequence, (ii) focusing more carefully on the motives for and conditions of policymaker’s
(successful) engagement in a securitization discourse. By putting the focus on status in the
international system, the state is taken as an entity. This means the paper does not follow the
Copenhagen School’s differentiation between state and societal security, where only the latter
is about identity (Waever 1995: 67).
15
Although allowing for the possibility that national
identity is dynamic and at times even contested, state and society are conflated by assuming
that, just as on questions of national security, the decision maker’s position represents the
most persuasive (and legitimate) interpretation of national identity in the domestic discourse
(Marcussen et al. 1999).
16
While this ‘state-centric’ view allows maintaining the
realist/rationalist assumption of the self-interested, or egoistic, state, it does not imply an
individualistic approach. Rather, building on insight from sociology and social psychology,
the paper conceptualizes the state as a social animal, seeing the ‘Self’ as embedded a larger
collective. Reminiscent of a classical two-level game in foreign policy analysis, and as further
discussed below, the decision-maker is placed at the intersection between the internal and the
external, between individual and collective. Before delving deeper into these dynamics and
how they are linked to questions of survival, some clarifying thoughts about the nature of
identity are in place.
Ordering Status: Ideas of Self and Other
Why identity? Putting the analytical spotlight on identity makes sense for a simple reason:
Individuals are driven by the need to build up Self-consciousness and define their place in the
world, to answer the “human longing for a positive Self-image” (Weller 1999: 265). One can
easily link this to Jef Huysmans’ (1998: 236ff) Nietzschean reminder of the individual’s need
to manage the uncertainty of death, a future which individual’s cannot escape but at the same
time is impossible to know. This ‘epistemological fear’ and the resulting desire for knowledge
is being channeled into the desire to obtain status. As Leah Greenfeld in her encompassing
investigation of the emergence of nationalism in Russia, Europe, and America, concluded that
it is “the desire for status” and the capacity to “make people feel good” that makes identity so
powerful in influencing human behavior (Greenfeld 1993: 488f; also Smith 1991; Honneth
1996). But before discussing the motivational dynamics behind the “will-to-manifest-
identity” (Hall 1999), one must pause for a while and ask: what is identity?
First and foremost, identity is a dichotomous concept that requires difference (Connolly
1991), generated positively and negatively by encompassing “images of individuality and
15
Waever et al. (1993) differentiate between five sectors (military, political, societal, economic, and
environmental) designating different referent objects and threats.
16
See, however, the critique by Zehfuss (2001), also Mc Sweeney (1999).
Convention