Nato’s Anglo-American identity and the Ukrainian crisis from an ontological security perspective – can a realist international system give diplomacy a chance?

Abstract

International military organizations derive their identity from the objectives they are set to perform thus acquiring ontological security. Organizations like NATO—adhering to a realist approach to International Relations (IR) and Security Studies (SS) – have historically reconfigured their identity depending on the ontological threat du jour by prioritizing Anglo-American interest at the expense of Russian and Franco-German socio-economic security. By adopting an ontological security perspective critically approaching a realist lens to IR and SS, the following sections highlights that NATO has in the past, and continues in the present, to acquire ontological security by constructing imaginaries founded on an ontological double-requirement emphasizing that Anglo-American Self-security is based on demanding a threatening Other-identity. That is, while most studies on NATO focus on the question “why does NATO still exist?”, the sections seek to highlight “how” did the process of ontological security seeking unfold, and what were the driving naturalized assumptions that enabled such process. The introductory section familiarizes the reader with the Anglo-American camp known as Atlanticism perceiving Continentalism interest as trivial. The second section defines the perspective of ontological security and its inter-related concepts of “critical situation”, “environmental stability”, “routine”, “socialization” and “narratives”. The third section highlights Atlanticist’s protracting the war in Ukraine for ontological security purposes by fabricating narratives relating to Russia seeking “past glory”, Ukraine becoming a possible NATO member, and finally, by undermining Franco-German sovereignty. The final section reveals the importance of considering diplomacy as the primary solution remedying the ontological insecurity accenting world politics.