Strategic Culture, Securitisation and the Use of Force: Post-911 Security Practices of Liberal Democracies by Wilhelm Mirow

Author:Wilhelm Mirow [Mirow, Wilhelm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, General, Political Science, Political Freedom, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781317406600
Google: nXL7CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-14T14:07:10+00:00

Conclusion and outlook

This chapter showed that the sequentially dialectical interplay between securitising actors, chiefly among these Tony Blair, and the ‘proactive-robust’ strategic culture of British society followed a largely coherent pattern across the three instances of decisions on the use of force. In all three instances, British strategic culture provided a conditioning formal cause and the Blair government’s securitisation agency a final cause of the relatively extensive and robust use of force against the perceived threats of the post-9/11 period. In all three instances, the government acquired largely positive resonance and thus reconditioned British strategic culture through morphostasis. In other words, since the government’s actions largely adhered to pre-existing norms and public expectations, they had no immediate impact on strategic culture in the form of a backlash or a shift.

However, the degree of positive resonance varies across the cases. In the case of the securitisation process leading to the Iraq War, dissonance among the audience already reached a critical level, as the parliamentary debates, media commentaries and public opinion polls show. The British government’s move to securitise a threat of Iraqi WMDs, triggered by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s early determination to set course on the removal of Saddam Hussein in early 2002 was ultimately successful. But the intense efforts required by the government to present its case and the intense scrutiny and scepticism on the side of the audience already demonstrated significant strain on the carrying capacity of British strategic culture.

The eventual non-existence of Iraqi WMDs, hence new information about the retrospective absence of an immediate threat, as well as the heavy casualties incurred during British post-war stabilisation and anti-terrorism efforts in Iraq are likely to have had a deferred conditioning effect on British strategic culture during the extended period of structural elaboration. One can therefore expect some morphogenesis towards a less ‘robust’ strategic culture through a loss of trust and alienation from the pre-war British political leadership having caused a re-evaluation of extant norms of British strategic culture among wider society. As Chapter 5 showed, one can discern declining rates of British public support for the use of force in public opinion polls across the later 2000s.

A possible expression of this effect can arguably be identified in the defeat of a House of Commons bill intended to authorise the UK to join US-led military strikes against Syria on 30 August 2013 by 285 to 272 votes (BBC News, 2013). Also, after the UK launched a military intervention in Libya alongside coalition in March 2011, an Ipsos MORI poll taken in April showed that only half of the respondents supported the military action (Ipsos MORI/Reuters, 2011). And yet it is telling that it would be the UK that poses the question of an armed intervention in Syria and gets involved in military action in Libya from the outset. It is also telling that the allegations of Edward Snowden about an extensive US-run global surveillance programme stirred an international uproar that was followed up on by allegations of an even

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