The Ontological Security Complex: The Impact of System Altering Events on States’ Existential Identities ____________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University _____________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Political Science _____________________________________________________ Aliviah Chaplin Chaplin 2 Table of Contents Introduction 3 Chapter 1: Ontological Security in International Relations 13 Chapter 2: Change, Identity, and the Ontological Security Complex 27 Chapter 3: Stepping Up: The United States Post-World War II 40 Chapter 4: Ontological Misalignment: Post-Soviet Russia 56 Conclusion 76 Bibliography 80 Chaplin 3 Introduction A New Cold War. The phrase is splashed across headlines, it titles academic articles, and it is often used by political pundits to describe the relations between the United States and the Russian Federation.1 The anxiety encapsulated in these renewed hostilities is showcased by book titles such as The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West and statements that “we are in a new cold war with Russia, fraught with hot war from Ukraine, to the Baltic regions, to Syria.”2 Much of the rhetoric surrounding the first Cold War included the ideas of the United States and then Soviet Union representing a universal struggle of good vs. evil. The two actors were diametrically opposed in every way possible with incompatible identities, and only one could win. This harsh view of relations seemed to ease with detente in the 1970’s, but the next decade brought the Year of the Spy and renewed hostilities. A new wave of optimism that the two countries would finally be able to work together within the international system came with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Flash forward to 2019 and Russia has been accused of meddling in the 2016 American presidential elections,3 Russia has accused the United States of meddling in the internal affairs of 1 Chris Miller, “The New Cold War’s Warm Friends,” Foreign Policy (blog), March 1, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/01/the-new-cold-wars-warm-friends/; Simon Shuster “Exclusive: Gorbachev Blames the U.S. For Provoking ‘New Cold War,’” Time, December 11, 2014, http://time.com/3630352/mikhail-gorbachev-vladimir-putin-cold-war/. 2 Edward Lucas and Vladimir Vladimirovič Putin, The New Cold War: Putin’s Threat to Russia and the West, 1. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Fox News, Scholar: Right Now, We Are in a New Cold War, n.d., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW2EtFsBndg 3 Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Government Officially Accuses Russia of Hacking Campaign to Interfere with Elections,” Washington Post, October 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/us-government-officially-accuses-russia-of-hacking-campaign-to-influence- elections/2016/10/07/4e0b9654-8cbf-11e6-875e-2c1bfe943b66_story.html; “Russia-Trump Inquiry: Russians Charged over US 2016 Election Tampering - BBC News,” February 18, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43092085. Chaplin 4 Venezuela and arming the anti-government opposition,4 and the two actors continually come head to head in the Middle East5—all while the country’s intelligence agencies battle it out in the covert world.6 It’s the era of the New Cold War. These events leave scholars and citizens alike with similar questions. Are the United States and Russia destined to be opposed in the international system? Is this truly a fight of good vs. evil that will last until it destroys the earth? At the heart of these questions are issues of state behavior and the foundational elements of what makes up state identity. This commonplace rhetoric indicates concern from the American perspective about what kind of actor Russia really is. Is Russia’s behavior a rejection of liberal measures? However, the anxiety over these questions is a symptom of a larger issue. Why states act the way they do has been a question that has continually driven the field of international relations and has pushed the development of theories that can be used to explain past and current behavior. Additionally, the 4 Ana Vanessa Herrero and Neil MacFarquhar, “Russia Warns U.S. Not to Intervene in Venezuela as Military Backs Maduro,” The New York Times, January 25, 2019, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/world/americas/venezuela-news-maduro-russia.html; “Russia Accuses U.S. of Planning to Arm the Opposition in Venezuela,” Reuters, February 23, 2019, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-venezuela-politics-usa-russia-idUKKCN1QB1BP; “Russia Ready to Help Venezuela Resolve Crisis, Warns U.S. Against...,” Reuters, February 13, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-russia-idUSKCN1Q12AT. 5 John B. Alterman, “Russia, the United States, and the Middle East | Center for Strategic and International Studies,” July 21, 2017, https://www.csis.org/analysis/russia-united-states-and-middle-east. 6 Anton Troianovski and Ellen Nakashima, “How Russia’s Military Intelligence Agency Became the Covert Muscle in Putin’s Duels with the West," The Washington Post, December 28, 2019 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/how-russias-military-intelligence-agency-became-the- covert-muscle-in-putins-duels-with-the-west/2018/12/27/2736bbe2-fb2d-11e8-8c9a- 860ce2a8148f_story.html?utm_term=.0519484490aa; Greg Miller, “As Russia Reasserts Itself, U.S. Intelligence Agencies Focus Anew on the Kremlin,” Washington Post, September 24, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/as- russia-reasserts-itself-us-intelligence-agencies-focus-anew-on-the-kremlin/2016/09/14/cc212c62-78f0- 11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html; Seth G. Jones, “Going on the Offensive: A U.S. Strategy to Combat Russian Information Warfare | Center for Strategic and International Studies,” October 1, 2018, https://www.csis.org/analysis/going-offensive- us-strategy-combat-russian-information-warfare. Chaplin 5 development of patterns to gain insight into possible future behavior and the analysis of state identity have been focal points for much constructivist research. International relations scholarship looks at the events unfolding within the international scene and asks how states will respond and what forces are at play when developing theories of state behavior. A careful observation and evaluation of state behavior can lead to the conclusion that some states act irrationally according to all conventional political theories encompassed in the three main international relations school of thought: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. However, expanding the reach of these schools of thought and using concepts from other social sciences can aide in the development of theories to explain seemingly irrational behavior. One such theory is that of ontological security. Ontological security theory is a theory within international relations scholarship that builds off sociological concepts to evaluate state behavior. The theory and its application in research, especially in the evaluation of historical cases, is not an attempt to discover previously unknown facts that change the narrative around a particular case or uncover new empirical evidence. Ontological security provides a new way to look at cases, especially ones that have been examined according to conventional analytical categories for far too long. It is a different narrative, explanation, and way of looking at previous and existing conflicts where state behavior doesn’t make sense. By telling a different story about the same event, the theory provides different insights. Ontological security theory has been used by international relations scholars to evaluate state behavior and investigate how actions in the name of security by one state influence and effect the security of other states. Chaplin 6 I seek to build off this foundational work to develop a more in-depth conception of ontological security. Existing literature has approached ontological security as just one singular concept, limiting its ability to provide an in-depth analysis of a wider variety of cases. My conception disaggregates ontological security into its individual parts— ontological security building blocks and the more surface level identities that are built on top of them—in an attempt to more concretely understand ontological security construction. This project looks at two of the most critical and system-defining events of the twentieth century—the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union—and attempts to glean new and deeper understandings of the forces at play in the international system. Not all states and not all people interact with their building blocks in the same way. In the case of the United States, the building blocks were a catalyst to propel the country into its role as global leader. Actors within the U.S. had argued that it was the destiny of the United States to lead the post-war world—determining the values that would define the international system and playing the central role in the construction of the post-war infrastructure. It was the ontological security building blocks and their compatibility with the United States’ post-war identity that allowed the country to step up into its inevitable role of global leader. Conversely, the building blocks acted as a hindrance in the case of post-Soviet Russia. While the country was trying to liberalize and integrate into the western-run