Historicizing Security: Enemies of the State, 1813-present

The research project ‘The History of National Security, 1945-present', is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Campus The Hague/Leiden University and the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH). The project will run until the summer of 2013, when we hope to present our findings. Intermediate products of the project will be published on this website.

Project description

After 1945, the (re-)construction of parliamentary democracies was paralleled by the development of a national security state: a system of organisations, policy procedures and other instruments directed at promoting national security – as well as the underlying ideology, culture and perceptions. How and why did this happen?

Parliamentary democracies entertain an ambivalent relationship with national security. As open societies, they are more vulnerable to external threats, but at the same time they require public legitimacy to adopt security measures – which themselves might contradict democratic values. This project compares national security regimes in three Western democracies (the Netherlands, the U.S. and [West-]Germany) during the 1945-2010 period.

It will provide a new view on postwar security history since it firstly rejects the ‘essentialist’ approach to threats and interests undertaken by traditional security studies and does not take for granted balance-of-power explanations for the build-up of military stocks and other security instruments. It rather brings the concept of national security to discussion and investigates why and how certain security threats and interests were perceived and gave rise to security measures (whereas others were overlooked), by exploring the political and social determinants that inform these measures. In the second place it will explore how these interests and threats were contested and how national security regimes transformed over time. Thirdly, it will demonstrate how the national security state became a defining aspect of parliamentary democracies. Through processes of identifying and excluding certain groups as threats to national security, the arena of democratic politics was redefined.

The project adds to our understanding of the “iron spine” of parliamentary democracies: the development of a national security state. It will analyze different types of national security regimes, the way they are determined, how ‘enemies of the state’ are constructed and how these regimes transformed through stages of contentious politics.

The Second World War gave birth to a new way of security-thinking. The way countries went about the construction of a national security state varied on one remarkable point: their performative power (e.g. the extent to which the security measures received public and political support and created a new reality of threat and security awareness) and political legitimacy. In this project we will ask the following questions:  

• Who were the decision-makers regarding the new national security infrastructures?

• What were their intentions, what threats did they identify? What factors did propel them to construct these images of national security threats and interests?

• Did these measures and corresponding threats possess political legitimacy?

• Did the decision-makers and/or their measures mobilize public and political support?

• Did the new security instruments change the underlying security regimes and culture, did they create new security and threat images?

In answering these questions, we will learn more about the way national security lies at the heart of modern western democracies, and to what extent national security is intertwined with both the political legitimacy conferred on the government by its citizens and the way governments strive to uphold their position of legitimate power by defining threats and dangers to their order.