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ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE RELAÇÕES INTERNACIONAIS VII Encontro Nacional 23 a 26 de julho de 2019 - Belo Horizonte/ PUC-Minas Área Temática: Segurança Internacional, Estudos Estratégicos e Política de Defesa IDENTITY PERFORMATIVITY AND US FOREIGN POLICY AFTER 9/11: THE CASE OF US INTERVENTION IN AFGHANISTAN Bárbara Vasconcellos de Carvalho Motta – Programa San Tiago Dantas (UNESP- UNICAMP-PUC-SP)/ Universidade Federal de Uberlândia Identity Performativity and US Foreign Policy after 9/11: the case of US intervention in Afghanistan Abstract After 9/11, the U.S. government started a process of making sense of the terrorist attacks. In discursive terms, the narrative needed to establish a clear and identifiable thread of thought that could confer meaning to the “post-traumatic confusion” settled after the attacks. In this sense, we have three objectives with this article. First, to present the identity-in-play model and, second, through this model, to show how the narratives constructed in the immediate after 9/11, by referencing key components of US identity, had the objective to navigate the US from a moment of ontological insecurity back to a moment of ontological security. Third, we plan on showing how the “who”, “whats” and “whys” presented by narratives of the Bush administration locked the 9/11 meaning in such a way that opposing actors could rarely find room for divergence, as it would often be presented as unpatriotic behavior, creating a scenario of virtually impossible non- approval of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Key words: Identity; US Foreign Policy; 9/11; Afghanistan Introduction In general, if the knowledge that identities matter is reasonably consolidated in International Relations (IR) works (WENDT, 1999; BIALLY-MATTERN, 2005; MCSWEENEY, 1999, among others), the evaluation of how identities matter and in what way they work to set the boundaries of political actions is still a work-in-progress. The necessity to bring identity to this account came with the perception that both language and the self (even if the self is a state) have an intrinsic relationship; a relationship that precludes one to fully exist without the other. Besides, when one assumes the non- epiphenomenal character of language, its relationship with identity is one of circularity: one produces and is at the same time produced by the other. Here, the artificially produced gap between constitutive versus causal explanations in International Relations (IR) debate is questioned. If it was imperative to take a side, I could not have followed through with this thesis’ debate in the way I propose it. In my perspective, the interconnection of identity and political practices is one of causality-in-constitution, that is, as political discourses heavily assented in an identity vocabulary constitutes identity by process of reification and transformation, they at the same time shape the debate in a way of producing the necessary conditions, hence causal, for certain political practices and foreign policy actions to take place. Nevertheless, since the notion of causality used here is not one embedded in the positivist debate, specialists might locate this work in the constitutive side of explanations. Thus, this article has three objectives. First, to present the identity-in-play model and, second, through this model, to show how the narratives constructed in the immediate after 9/11, by referencing key components of US identity, had the performative capacity to navigate the US from a moment of ontological insecurity back to a moment of ontological security. Third, we plan on showing how the “who”, “whats” and “whys” presented by narratives of the Bush administration locked the 9/11 meaning in such a way that opposing actors could rarely find room for divergence, as it would often be presented as unpatriotic behavior, creating a scenario of virtually impossible non-approval of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Identity performativity and the identity-in-play model It is impossible and even meaningless the effort to find the causa prima of identity, especially within the social arrangements that conform it in a class or a group. As one goes back in time to locate a nation’s, for the matters of this thesis, identity, every historical event trace back to another event that traces even further back to another moment in history. The human sciences have tried to explain the construction of identity and its repercussions through multiple approaches - either directly using the word ‘identity’ or through different expressions that convey similar meaning. The demarcation of identity’s boundaries, however, runs the risk of falling either to the extreme of generalism, losing explanatory validity, or to the error of considering too many specificities, thus making it impossible to abstract it away from a specific context and travel across cases. Even more problematic, a work that focus on a nation’s identity and its respective effects in foreign policy decisions might fall into the trap of locating the analysis in the extreme of objectivism or the extreme of subjectivism, either considering identity as an immutable structure, and a source of identifiable regularities, or solely as the feature of one’s own mind; or, still problematic, either looking to the ‘real’ world as a source of validity of an identity and dismissing subjective components as only individual features and thus not logical or stable enough for a scientific analysis, or, on the other hand, considering the subjectivity of political actors’ minds and behaviors through an objectifying method of analysis (e.g. statistical analysis on political values) to predict intentionality. Following this discussion, if identity constructs shared understandings, expectations, and behaviors, the ontological security - security as being and not merely security as survival (MCSWEENEY, 1999) - is the possibility of a stable relationship between one’s identity and the external environment. In order to understand the common sense created by identity's dispositions and how they affect foreign policy decisions, I developed what I called identity’s anchor points and the ‘identity-in-play’ model. The anchor points were selected through both deductive and inductive logic. Deductively, using US liberal history as a background, I selected some of the most important ideas in the long durée of US ideational composition, as, for instance, the anchor points “equality”, “liberty/freedom”, “individualism”, and “democracy”. Throughout the empirical research, and hence inductively, I evaluated not only how agents deployed those anchor points but especially whether my selection made sense. The sense behind the nomenclature “anchor points” is the abstract notion that when deployed they have the capacity to ‘anchor’ or to ‘ground’ identity and discursively sustain it, reinforcing, evolving, emerging or fixing it when it's breaking down. This first approach on identity’s discursive dispositions proposes a spectrum of what Americans mean when they mention “equality”, “liberty/freedom”, “individualism”, and “democracy”. In the empirical research, although the national field has the meta-capital to exert its influence within and across other fields, including the practical sense of the foreign policy subfield, the anchor points suffer a process of contingent specification when they are deployed in this subfield to justify foreign policy specific situations. The image below illustrates this point. Developed by the author What the image proposes is that within the national habitus-field relationship, identity’s anchor points assume the widest possible range of meanings encompassed in the American mentalité. As they establish the vocabulary (by means of spoken language or not) around with the practical sense of the national field is sustained, at this level the selected anchor points present the most abstract and general spectrum of identity. Besides, since they cut through national subfields they assume contingent narrower ranges of meaning and are deployed differently depending on which form of capital is more relevant to a specific subfield. At the national level, the anchor points are enacted by modes that go from ordinary daily practices to national parties, hymns, holidays, monuments, school’s literature classics, and many other forms. In general, however, identity’s dispositions in the format of discursive anchor points are, in a greater or lesser extent, whether the emphasis is only in one anchor point or in the combination of some, always present in national subfields. Anyway, as the above image proposes, to interpret how the anchor points are deployed in the foreign policy subfield, I propose two stages of specification. In the intermediary level I will borrow Jackson’s (2006) terminology: the anchor points are converted into commonplaces, that is, through a process of delimitation each administration (or other agent with enough power within this sub-field), usually in the State of the Union or in important documents as the National Security Strategy, sets the boundaries within which it understands the usage in meaning of national anchor points. For instance, among the spectrum of possible meanings for the anchor point of democracy, its commonplace version presents how one administration understands and establishes it contingently to its specific moment in history. To illustrate, while Clinton during the Kosovo crisis seemed to deploy democracy more in a ‘due process’ meaning, that is, as a system of states’ organization, Bush