the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

220 widening and deepening securityintervention’. The consequences of that representational shift for how ‘theWest’ constituted itself, particularly how governments legitimated themselvesto the international community, to besieged parties to the conflictsand to the media and citizens of their own countries who demanded that‘something must be done’, was a key theme in several Poststructuralistanalyses (Campbell, 1996, 1998a, 2002a, 2002b; Ó Tuathail, 1996; Crawfordand Lipschutz, 1997; Kuusisto, 1998; Hansen, 2000b, 2001, 2006;Malmvig, 2001, 2006). A big question was whether such interventionsshifted the Cold War constitution of the Other as antagonistic, threateningand radically different and of the ensuing identity of the Self assuperior, threatened and the embodiment of universal values. SeveralPoststructuralists argued that the central Other was no longer a radicallydifferent threat, but a humanitarian ‘victim’ in need of a ‘rescue’,but that this subject construction depoliticised the conflicts and allowedthe West the appearance of ‘doing something’ without fundamentallyacknowledging its responsibility (Campbell, 1998a; Debrix, 1999: 159).The ambiguity of humanitarianism was also at the heart of Campbell’sattempt to develop a Poststructuralist ethics drawing on the 1990–91 GulfWar, the war in Bosnia (1993; 1998a) and the philosophies of Levinas andDerrida. Campbell argued in favour of recognising the Other as Otherwithout constituting it either as radically different, a ‘victim’ or an underdevelopedversion of the Self, and of recognising one’s responsibility forits well-being. Campbell’s ethical security project was also an attemptto counter the frequent criticism that Poststructuralism merely observedand deconstructed the policies in place, rather than formulate a pro-activeand constructive approach (Walt, 1991; Adler, 1997b; Katzenstein et al.,1998).The question of whether a non-radical Other could be the ontologicalfoundation for state identity was also at the heart of debates over theEU. Wæver (1996) argued that the main constitutive Other was that ofEurope’s own past, and hence that the main threat in discourses supportingEU integration was the reappearance of conflict between France andGermany (Wendt, 2003). Turning from the ‘Self as temporal Other’ toEurope’s relationship to its ‘new’ border regions, other studies focusedon the competing constructions of Turkey, the Balkans, Russia and theMediterranean as not only radically different, but as bridges or ambiguouszones between East and West (Neumann and Welsh, 1991; Hansen,1996; Neumann, 1996b, 1999; Rumelili, 2004; Malmvig, 2006; Pace, 2006).Looking to the institutional centre of Western security, the possibility ofNATO moving beyond a dichotomous construction of Western civilised