Ontological security as temporal security? The role of ‘significant historical others’ in world politics
| Author | Kathrin Bachleitner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211045624 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211045624
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(1) 25 –47
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178211045624
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Ontological security as
temporal security? The role
of ‘significant historical
others’ in world politics
Kathrin Bachleitner
University of Oxford, UK
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qualitative discourse analysis of historical documents during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the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.
Keywords
Austria, collective memory, external support in the Middle East conflict, international state
behaviour, ontological security, Six-Day War, West Germany, Yom Kippur War and oil crisis
Introduction
Identity shapes state behaviour. Since that statement was raised almost to the status of
law in constructivism, scholars strive to specify the process by which this relationship
Corresponding author:
Kathrin Bachleitner, University of Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall, Norham Gardens, Oxford OX26QA, UK.
Email: kathrin.bachleitner@lmh.ox.ac.uk
1045624IRE0010.1177/00471178211045624International RelationsBachleitner
research-article2021
Article
26 International Relations 37(1)
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 not only physical security
as classical IR theory had traditionally suggested. Ontological security-seeking happens
– according to most scholars – through ‘biographical continuity’. However, when it
comes to the question of how states establish such biographical continuity, the scholar-
ship differs widely and remains vague in its answers. Some focus on routinised relation-
ships 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’.3 Contained in any
identity construction, after all, are both components: the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Yet both
perspectives struggle to define precisely a country’s ‘self’ or ‘identity’, as well as its
‘significant other’. As a result, OS scholars have been criticised for relying on a too-
static identity concept that often locks behaviour into a particular course of action for the
sake of ensuring ontological security or stability.4 However, ‘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.
To re-frame OS’s identity–behaviour nexus as an evolving process rather than a static
outcome in IR, this article specifies what a country’s self-conversation with identity
looks like in practice. It suggests re-defining OS’s inward-looking conversation with
identity along temporal lines: a country’s self or identity emerges from its past experi-
ence, which is transported into its present through ‘narration’, or (as this dynamic pro-
cess is widely referred to in the interdisciplinary literature) through ‘collective memory’.5
Importantly, in the collective-memory concept, history – the past as it happened – is
gaining traction for identity only through present interpretation. In the course of such a
‘temporal’ identity construction, the ‘significant other’ is not any longer a contemporary,
spatial ‘external other’, but a ‘significant historical other’ from the country’s past.
In combining insights from the interdisciplinary collective-memory literature with
IR’s existing ontological security scholarship, this article puts forward a new understand-
ing of OS’s identity–behaviour nexus in IR. It specifies precisely how a country’s self-
conversation with identity plays out, and it contributes answers to two central and
ongoing theoretical debates within the ontological security scholarship: what constitutes
a country’s ‘self’, and who is its ‘significant other’? By situating a country’s identity
explicitly along a temporal line, the framework developed in this paper aims to expand
the notion of ontological security to describe an evolving, internal conversation between
a country’s self and its ‘significant historical other’. Based on these new propositions, the
paper coins its own concept of ‘temporal security’ which re-frames OS’s identity–behav-
iour nexus as a ‘memory–behaviour nexus’. For the IR discipline as a whole, the paper
therefore makes use of the interdisciplinary collective-memory concept and suggests
ways to integrate it fruitfully into existing IR explanations of state behaviour.
After the development of the temporal-security framework, its explanatory potential
is illustrated in an empirical case study of the two former Nazi perpetrator states, West
Germany (FRG) and Austria. They have been selected because they both internalised
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