Abstract

This article explores the link between collective memory and state behaviour in international relations. In that regard, it develops a new concept entitled ‘temporal security’. Building on the existing ontological security literature, it extends a temporal understanding to its underlying identity concept. Countries are now assumed to be temporal-security seekers vis-a-vis a ‘significant historical other’ from their past. Decision makers thus enter into a self-reflective conversation with their country’s ‘collective memory’ when choosing courses of action. Contrasted with existing physical-security and ontological security explanations for state behaviour, the explanatory potential of the temporal-security approach is in a second step illustrated by the empirical case of West Germany and Austria, two former Nazi perpetrator states, and their respective assignments of support during conflict in the Middle East. Through a comparative, qualitative discourse analysis of historical documents during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War and oil crisis of 1973, the empirical study finds that West Germany and Austria adopted different courses of action in their international politics, because they looked to Nazi Germany as their significant historical other.

Highlights

  • The international relations (IR) concept of ontological security (OS) offers helpful insights into how the nexus between identity and behaviour plays out in states: to be secure, countries establish an integrity with their identity through their behaviour

  • Some focus on routinised relationships with ‘external others’ as the strongest factors influencing the way in which identity forms behaviour,[2] whereas others see biographical continuity as emerging from an inward-looking perspective, that is, the orientation towards the ‘self’

  • OS scholars have been criticised for relying on a toostatic identity concept that often locks behaviour into a particular course of action for the sake of ensuring ontological security or stability.[4]

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Summary

Introduction

Unfolds.[1] In particular, the international relations (IR) concept of ontological security (OS) offers helpful insights into how the nexus between identity and behaviour plays out in states: to be secure, countries establish an integrity with their identity through their behaviour. In other words, they seek ontological security, and physical security as classical IR theory had traditionally suggested. Ontological security-seeking happens – according to most scholars – through ‘biographical continuity’ When it comes to the question of how states establish such biographical continuity, the scholarship differs widely and remains vague in its answers. ‘ontological security’ – as this article hopes to illustrate and thereby add to the literature – is not a fixed outcome to be achieved, but rather describes a process that unfolds through a permanently evolving self-conversation between identity and state behaviour

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