Sabine Selchow

Human security: a new strategic narrative for Europe

This article examines the potential of human security as a narrative and operational frame for the European Unions external relations. Human security is about the security of individuals and communities and it links physical and material security—‘freedom from fear’, and ‘freedom from want’. The article addresses both the lexis (language) and praxis (practice)of human security in relation to the EU. Much of the language currently used in EU external relations, particularly crisis management, civil—military cooperation and conflict management, already contains elements of a human security approach. At the same time, the concept of human security goes beyond these terms and if formally adopted and elaborated could greatly strengthen the EUs role as a global security actor. The article develops five principles of human security—human rights, legitimate political authority, multilateralism and regional focus—and makes the case that the application of these principles would increase the coherence, effectiveness and visibility of EU missions. The article concludes that the adoption of a human security approach would build on the foundational ideas of Europe in overcominga history of war and imperialism and could help to rally public opinion behind the European idea. More importantly, it would contribute to closing the real security vacuum that exists in large parts of the world today.

The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe

This article presents the findings of a collaborative research project involving seven field teams across Europe investigating a range of new political phenomena termed ‘subterranean politics’. The article argues that the social mobilizations and collective activities in 2011 and 2012 were probably less joined up, more heterogeneous, and, perhaps, even, smaller, than similar phenomena during the last decade, but what was striking was their ‘resonance’ among mainstream public opinion—the ‘bubbling up’ of subterranean politics. The main findings included: • Subterranean political actors perceive the crisis as a political crisis rather than a reaction to austerity. Subterranean politics is just as much a characteristic of Germany, where there are no austerity policies, as other countries. • Subterranean political actors are concerned about democracy but not as it is currently practised. They experiment with new democratic practises, in the squares, on the Internet, and elsewhere. • This new political generation not only uses social networking to organize but the Internet has profoundly affected the culture of political activism. • In contrast to mainstream public debates, Europe is ‘invisible’ even though many subterranean political actors feel themselves to be European. The research concludes that the term ‘subterranean politics’ is a useful concept that needs further investigation and that Europe needs to be problematized to seek a way out of the crisis.

‘Global Civil Society’ and the Internet 2012: Time to Update Our Perspective

To date, there are around 2 billion people using the internet (see Chapter 5 this volume, Figure 5.1). The 750 million active users of the social network site Facebook share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month (Facebook Statistics 2011). Each minute more than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube (YouTube Blog 2011) and 3,000 new pictures are shared on Flickr, which in September 2010 had a stock of 5 billion images (Flickr Blog 2010). Each day around 200 million 140-character-messages are sent via Twitter; this is the equivalent of a 10-million-page book per day, or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Twitter Blog 2011). Social media services, such as Twitter, have not only become an integral part of people’s daily lives, but these days also guide military strategies, such as the NATO strikes in Libya (Norton-Taylor and Hopkins 2011), and play a considerable role in contemporary mass activism (see Chapter 3 this volume).

Resilience and resilient in Obama’s National Security Strategy 2010: Enter two ‘political keywords’

Under US President Obama, the words resilience and resilient have been applied beyond the odd occasion in the National Security Strategy (NSS) document. Through a systematic analysis of the NSS 2010, the research behind this article sought to determine if there was anything in this linguistic phenomenon of interest to scholars in political studies. The article argues that what makes the appearance of the two words in the NSS 2010 relevant is not what these words do but what is done to them in the text. It shows how the document constructs resilience and resilient in a distinct way as symbolic tools with a high degree of semantic openness, a particular positive connotation and deontic meaning. The article argues that the use of the two words in the NSS 2010 can be seen as an exercise in ‘occupying’ them with ideologically loaded meanings, which can be interpreted as the actualisation of both words as ‘political keywords’. The article demonstrates the relevance of this insight for political scholars as the ground for future explorations of the popular discourse of ‘resilience’ through the concept of ‘political keywords’.

Introduction — In Search of Europe’s Future: Subterranean Politics and the Other Crisis in Europe

There is a growing body of research and commentary on the current global crisis and its social and political consequences. The majority of these studies take ‘the crisis’ to be a financial crisis that has been unfolding since 2007,1 sometimes reading and analysing it as a crisis of capitalism as we know it. The outcome of these analyses is diverse and rich. Yet, they share the assumption that the financial crisis is the context that guides their research in terms of the questions that scholars ask and in terms of how they assess current political activism. In a subtle way, then, the financial crisis has come to serve as a key frame through which current socio-political developments and happenings are explored; socio-political phenomena, such as recent protests like Occupy, are analysed and, not least, evaluated with regard to their relationship to the financial crisis (and its consequences), or as a reaction against or a failure to react to it.

The paths not (yet) taken: Ulrich Beck, the ‘cosmopolitized world’ and security studies

While it is Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘risk society’ that has mostly attracted attention in the field of security studies, in this article I argue that if we want to take Beck seriously, we need to go beyond his ‘risk society’ thesis and acknowledge that his main thesis was that we live in a social reality that is qualitatively new and, consequently, calls for a radical shift in how we look at and talk about it. To bring Beck into security studies, then, means to study ‘security’ from within Beck’s ‘new world’. For that, I argue, a sharper conception of what characterizes that world is needed. At the heart of my article I provide such a conception – the ‘cosmopolitized world’ – which I identify as being shaped by non-linearity and the interplay of two moments: the ‘cosmopolitized reality’ and the ‘tradition of the national perspective’. Building on this concept and experimenting with it, I turn to reading the ‘US national security’ discourse as this is constructed in the text of the 2015 National Security Strategy from within this ‘cosmopolitized world’. Reflecting on this experiment, I conclude by highlighting the potential that bringing Beck in this way into security studies holds, as well as pointing to the need for future work on the vocabulary of the ‘cosmopolitized world’.

The construction of “European security” in The European Union in a changing global environment: a systematic analysis

ABSTRACT In June 2015 High Representative Mogherini presented her strategic assessment The European Union in a changing global environment as the express point of reference for the new EU Global Strategy. Grounded in the premise that this assessment is not simply a description of the state of the world but plays into the construction of social reality, this article sets out to understand the openings and closings of possibilities that it holds. My analysis generates a number of concrete insights, ranging from insights into the distinct nature of the challenges the EU is facing, to the discovery that there is no “existential threat” and the importance of “regions” as a guiding category. Grounded in an understanding of the world as being reflexive modern, I interpret these findings as displaying an intriguing and paradoxical interpretive disposition. On the one side, there is a notable opening towards unconventional conceptions of the world; on the other side, there is a symbolic conservation of existing EU institutions and programmes and a reproduction of modern premises. I argue that it is the first aspect that makes the document significant: Mogherini’s strategic assessment opens an important discursive space to think (European) security anew.