Campbell: Writing Security

Campbell, D., 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, University of Minnesota Press.

Ch 1: Provocations of Our Time

“The demise of the cold war has been much heralded. But the causzes, meaning, and implications of this political rupture (assuming its veracity) are much debated” (15).

“To proclaim the end of the cold war assumes that we know what the cold war was” (15).

“The interpretive approach…sees theory as practice: the theory of international relations is one instance of the pervasive cultural practices that serve to discipline ambiguity” (17).

He defines the “late modern period” as one of “the globalization of contingency, the, “increasing tendencies toward ambiguity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty on our horizon” (17). These are not just from the outside in, but they also come from within (or most importantly come from within?). “This globalization of contingency…renders problematic the discursive practices that have made those spatializations of power possible…The irruption of contingency opens up the possibility of observing that foundational discourses…work to constitute the identities in whose name they operate” (18).

The key to understanding “what was at stake” in the cold war is through the analysis of discourse. Other attempts to flesh out the subject-object continuum are less than helpful. “…if we accept that there is nothing possible outside of discourse…the way is open to reconsider what was at stake in the cold war” (22).

Examines some of the important national security documents that have been declassified and speeches given by leaders. There is a constant reiteration of the themes of the state, the moral justification for action, and the desire to fill an international void with order. There is a constant reminder of the dangers of global communism and their intention for global expansion. However, this threat is not the full reason that the US undertook certain aggressive policies; the desire to become a great power, an international leader, was a crucial aspect of foreign policy. The author argues that the “cold war” is much more than what it is traditionally thought to be, and the same mentality continues to prevail.

Ch 2: Rethinking Foreign Policy

The chapter begins by exploring questions of identity and difference. Firstly, it explores questions posed to immigrants to the US that are concerned with, “…the elimination of that which is alien, foreign, and perceived as a threat to a secure state” (36). “Does the inside of a state exist in marked contrast to the outside? What is at stake in the attempt to screen the strange, the unfamiliar, and the threatening associated with the outside from the familiar and safe, which are linked to the inside?” (36).

The etymology of foreign is explored. “How is it that we…came to understand foreign policy as the external deployment of instrumental reason on behalf of an unproblematic internal identity situated in an anarchic realm of necessity?” (37). “Thus, if one were operating in terms of the ‘levels-of-analysis’ metaphor found in traditional international relations literature, the argument here would need to be regarded at a level beyond that associated with either the state or the international system. The argument here is concerned with the representation of history that allows us to talk in terms of ‘the state’ and ‘the international system,’ and the impact that problematization has had on our understanding of foreign policy” (37). “[I]t is about how the conventional understanding of foreign policy was made possible via a discursive economy that gave value to representational practices associated with a particular problematization” (37-8).

He then explores the traditional IR definition and approach to thinking about the state and the international system. The traditional rupture between the early authority of the church that was said to transition to the state after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is used as a foundation for conceptualizing foreign policy today. Campbell claims that a (re)writing of history would provide space for possibly a new interpretation of foreign policy can emerge.

On Westphalia: “For international relations, this rendering of the We4stphalian moment constitutes the conditions of possibility for the discipline. IT establishes the point of origin necessary to suggest that, in contrast to the religious and political structures of the preceding millennia, the history of modern Europe since the Peace of Westphalia has been a history of sovereign states acting in a multistate system” (41).

Extensive discussion of Christianity as it relates to the traditional narrative of IR.

“To talk of the endangered nature of the modern world and the enemies and threats that about in it is thus not to offer a simple ethnographic description of our condition; it is to invoke a discourse of danger through which the incipient ambiguity of our world can be grounded in accordance with the insistence of identity. Danger might therefore be thought of as the new god for the modern world of states, not because it is peculiar to our time, but because it replaces the logic of Christendom’s evangelism of fear” (50). Foreign policy disciplines the state. The state acts out of fear of violent death.