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Searching for the Intangible: A Response to Mouritzen

SECURITY COMMUNITIES are intangible in the sense that they are mainly cognitive rather than material constructions. They reflect a we-feeling among their members. They are something that has to be believed in, expected, sensed, thought and felt. Likewise, security policy is an ideational project and a mental reflection: security is as it is thought and spoken of. Security policy mirrors change and continuity in perceptions and misperceptions, beliefs and disbeliefs, learning and unlearning. What are thought to be security issues varies over time and across actors. How policymakers respond to what they regard as security issues reflects historical and political judgements that, in turn, follow from estimations and opinions. To say that policymakers have to respond to what they define as a threat to security in one and only one way underestimates human agency: security policy, like all social action, is an action that could be otherwise. Security policy can lead to a security community or not. I argue that whether or not it leads to a security community depends to some extent on the shared understandings of the concept of difference among the states and societies involved in the construction process. A security community is defined by dependable expectations of peaceful change among its members. There are multiple ways of achieving such expectations, not just the one that follows the logic of the liberal-democratic peace that is suggested in many current writings on security communities and region-building in Europe’s north. In a sense, the democratic peace proposition is narrower than the security community paradigm because the absence of violence among democracies does not necessarily have to indicate the presence of expectations of peaceful change. But, of course, peace among democracies may lead to a security community among democracies. Yet, a security community is realizable in multiple ways. The condition of its possibility is a commitment among its members to peaceful resolution of conflicts: while within a security community most values are negotiable, peaceful change is not. The prescription by the current members of a security community of a certain set of norms, values, institutions and procedures besides peaceful change may be an adequate strategy for the enlargement of a security community in some cases. It may be wholeheartedly accepted or, reflecting power relations, only reluctantly acquiesced to by would-be members. In other cases, this may not be an adequate strategy. Therefore, I argue against a naturalization of one specific manifestation of security community-building. In my article in this issue of Security Dialogue,1 I