The concept of normative threat
Article author query
creppell i [Google Scholar]
Ingrid Creppella1 c1
a1 Department of Political Science and the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Abstract
Why are some acts, events, or people elevated to a status of a threat, when no hostile action or direct physical damage appears imminent? Why are some relationships of threat infused with intense emotionality and ethical language? In this paper, I argue that puzzles such as these can be understood if we develop a concept of normative threat. The role of ethical values and beliefs has not been sufficiently integrated with the threat literature. Many writers assume that ethical language tied to constructions of threat serves merely to disguise and palliate the underlying hard reality of struggles for power. This is too simplistic. I offer an approach that takes seriously the normativity of the threat experience for people as members of political bodies. I argue that perceptions of threat emerge and carry a heightened emotional and moral energy when basic features of a political body's normative order appear to be at stake and people believe action affirming their strength as a collective body is required. Normative order comprises a set of principles citizens believe to be necessary for the functioning, justifiability, and indeed ‘reality’ of their political body. A normative threat is perceived as a promise of harm to the political body through defiance of basic principles of order and right that constitute one's group. The paper describes three main types of normative threat: transgression/grievance, subversion/insecurity, abomination/indignant aversion.
Keywords
threat;
order;
normative beliefs;
body politic;
emotions;
Identity
The idea of threat permeates political discourse in the contemporary world. Sensations of looming danger are triggered from many sources: terrorist bombings; border insecurity; upheavals of political authority in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere; immigration and multicultural policies; military changes in China, Iran or North Korea; and cyber attacks disabling security and financial systems. These and other sources make the language and perception of threat a central political phenomenon. How well do we understand that phenomenon?
The dominant paradigm treats threat as implying harm of a concrete physical nature: troops amassed at one's border or bombs hidden in the landscape. Threat is compared to a house on fire, where the urgency of danger is palpable. In the terminology of traditional international relations, state-death connotes a bodily destruction to members, the prospect of which engenders readiness for coercive, possibly violent reaction. But the latter metaphor indicates the ambiguity in the nature of the perceived harm. State death may bring no discernible physical destruction to members as individual persons. To highlight the need to think more extensively about the nature of threat perception, consider these instances – each of central relevance to international dynamics – which display the indefiniteness of how danger is perceived by members of political bodies.
The United States entered the World War I in 1917, after having remained officially neutral for nearly 3 years. The genesis of the perception of Germany as a threat to the United States could not have been due to imminent invasion or Germany's direct hostility to the United States; the Germans had requested that the United States remain out of the war. Neither the attack on the Lusitania nor the Zimmerman telegraph (even if taken together) was sufficient to render Germans as America's enemies, without a framework of interpretation that would make sense of joining the European war. How might we understand the nature of the German threat in this case?
The Cold War defined the international system during the 20th century, and innumerable analyses have debated the causes of that relationship. A stark contrast divides those who see it as a competition for international power and military supremacy vs. those who stress the ideological antipathy between the United States and Soviet Union. Neither one seems wholly sufficient. The intensity of the hostility did not derive from an expectation by either side that it would be invaded by the other, or that the economic system sustaining each way of life teetered on collapse because of the existence of the other. The fear of nuclear danger – indeed a bodily fear – was not the cause of threat but a consequence of their hostility. An ideological explanation would have to take into account the fact that the United States differed from other important Communist nations but did not view them as a threat. Can we find another way to explain the nature of perceived harm posed by these competitors?
Or consider non-state actors: al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers. When the motives of the hijackers were analyzed, one provocation that many noticed was the presence of American military bases in Saudi Arabia. A troop contingent is by its very nature a physical entity comprised of human bodies with military weapons that can be deployed to destroy other physical and material entities. Was the perception of threat posed by an American military presence fundamentally a sensation of impending physical or material harm to members of al-Qaeda or the attackers living in Europe?
One more example, while not of the traditional sort, indicates the increasingly complex sources of international dynamics and ought to be of interest to scholars of International Relations (IR). In November 2010, Oklahoma state election ballots included ‘The Oklahoma International Law Amendment’ requiring that Oklahoma courts rely on federal or state laws when handing down decisions. A majority of Oklahomans voted in favor of this amendment. Did they fear an encroachment of Sharia law, and the destruction of their economic and legal system?
All of these examples highlight the inadequacy of interpreting the threat experience as one of physical material damage. People, acts, and events often do not exhibit clear willful intention to harm the existence of the threatened; they are not direct attacks and yet they mobilize people to out-of-the-ordinary vigilance and potential violence. Heightened emotion and moral rhetoric accompany these perceptions. The ambiguity is this: threats are promises of destruction to something essential about one's group or nation, but the concreteness of the harm is not always apparent and the content of that ‘something essential’ may be indeterminate.
In this paper, I formulate and defend the idea of normative threat as a distinct type of threat, the conceptualization of which will help to make sense of cases like those above. The prevailing threat literature based on strategic interest or social–psychological predisposition cannot adequately explain them. A normative lens also throws light on new shapes of threat in a more globalized political world. Increasingly, people respond to political events and encounters through local, national, international, and global categories. In the international arena, citizens may continue to feel and reason primarily as members of sovereign political bodies (constituted states), yet given changes in technology and communication, their perceptions, identities, and allegiances beyond states can be mobilized at multiple levels and in complex, overlapping ways. A conception of normative threat offers another interpretive lens for analyzing the shifting, often ambiguous experiences of collective danger. I believe that headway can be made by clearing basic theoretical ground around this important notion.
The paper is structured as follows. In the first main section, I consider the objection raised in arguing for a distinct type of normative threat: that perceptions of threat are at base beliefs and sensations about impending physical harm, which underscores emphasis on ‘power’ and strategic dominance. In the second section, I show the importance of treating threat from the point of view of ‘a people’ or the general population. The cogency of a non-individualist point of view enables us to describe normative motivation as a primary orientation and a concrete good of a political group. In the third section, I examine normative order as a basis of a body politic coming under threat and show how people hold and can be committed to this order. The final major section presents three types (modes) of harm to normative order, which create emotionally heightened perceptions of threat.
Threat will be provisionally defined as an expectation of significant harm to a political body. Five core elements form the nucleus of the threat concept: (a) the threat: a signal of danger enacted/made and received/perceived – that is, a conveyance of information about something to happen; (b) the threatener: the entity or act/event perpetrating the danger signal; (c) the dangerousness of the threat: the content of harm/danger; (d) the threatened: the entity expected to suffer or be damaged; and (e) perceiver or interpreter of the harm. These elements of the threat concept are usually entangled in everyday and research language. People may be interested in one or more angles of this complex phenomenon. For my purposes, I shall be focused on the perception of harm by persons as members of political bodies. The notion of harm to political bodies involves abstract and concrete dimensions. In the section following, I begin by showing the deficiency of a primarily physical concept of harm.
The physicality of danger
Hobbes – the most quoted authority on hostility – emphasized the materiality of the sources and experience of endangerment, referring to the primal ‘fear of death and wounds’ which should lead persons to give up their freedom, enter society, and follow laws. The state of nature – a condition in which every man is enemy to every man – was characterized as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – a fundamentally material deprivation (Hobbes 1996, 89). Robert Jervis used Wolfers’ description of extreme danger as analogous to finding oneself in ‘a house on fire’ as a starting point for his analysis of leaders’ interpretations of threat. In a recent text on global security, the author notes: ‘Although this study favours a broad approach to the subject, security becomes too diluted a concept if cultural change is accommodated alongside matters of life and death’ (Hough 2008, 114). Another recent work on fear and enmity describes short- and long-term triggers to aversive behavior as comparable to, respectively, a snake in one's path and an invasion (Evrigenis 2008, 7). For the most part, danger is conceptualized as physical. On the spectrum of human desire, living as creatures with bodies on earth must rank as most basic and what humans fear most is the disablement or death of those bodies. Threat is that which portends such an outcome.
The main approach to studying threat in international relations – the realist and neorealist paradigms – takes the state as the locus of agency. When we move to the level of the state, harm continues to be envisioned as basically physical and material. Threat is assumed to be about sources of degradation to the state's power vis-à-vis other states, and ultimately that power must be located in a material concrete reality. While Morgenthau (1948) accepted that power could be ideological, the basic thrust of this orientation locates power in concrete ascertainable forms, in ‘reality’ displayed and tested through war, development of arms and technology, and importantly for intergroup/state coercion, achieving ‘facts on the ground’. The state, as a monopolization of physical violence, confronts threats in the action or will of another state or group seeking to dislodge its capacity to deploy state power as force. For members, an abstract idea of the political unit is grounded in the state's protection of their individual embodiment. Threat to the state reverberates to sensations of members’ own bodily insecurity.
Yet, what is it that people perceive as a mortal challenge to the group or state with which they are tied? It seems paradoxical that leaders or people fear bodily destruction of a population when the response to threat is often to put one's body on the line through combat. The calculation here might be that the state risks the fate of some bodies to increase the probability of saving more. But leaders and individuals risk themselves. In trying to parse this, it becomes apparent that threat cannot be solely physical or material but inevitably involves an abstract element.1 What is threatened may be an idea of an independent unity, which the outer form of the state institutionalizes and protects. Threat cannot be equated with ‘death’ or bodily harm, individual or en masse.
It is not possible to provide a complete set of distinguishing criteria of physical and normative threat, but we can attempt a basic contrast. Physical dangers can be conceptualized in more tangible and visible forms, and pointed to as potential dangers to one's bodily survival or to the material quality of life: bombs, invasion, economic sanctions, and forces that destroy the protective capacity of one's country. Normative threats are less sensate. One can designate an act, event, or person who one believes will bring harm, but the harbinger will not display that harm on the surface, and the nature of the harm will be indirect and require a greater degree of interpretation. Normative threat portends a change in one's way of life or in the patterns or rules one expects to govern relationships. Alternative models of right or justice may be in certain circumstances threats with no inherent aggressive intentions accompanying them. Some phenomena triggering perceptions of threat – immigration and economic challenges, for instance – fall in between the ideal-typical versions of physical and normative danger. The fact that some phenomena will not be easily classifiable does not obviate the substance of the distinction. Neither does the fact that the physical and normative themselves will sometimes overlap in intricate ways. Distinguishing the types improves our understanding of threat. One point of my analysis of a normative conception of threat will acknowledge the relevance of physical well-being through the order that is necessary for sustained concrete existence. Ultimately, I would emphasize that physical harm to persons as members of political entities involves a conceptual dimension and normative harm to order is more concrete than realized.
Two additional features of a physicalist understanding of threat should lead us to go beyond it. First, people care about more than physical survival, and have shown this to be true throughout human history and across cultures. The concept of ‘second nature’ articulated in memorable terms first by Cicero, and used by subsequent thinkers like Montaigne and Marx, provides a theoretical basis for linking animal physicality to constructed, cultural, and more abstract inventions of self and norms. All human existence is rooted in particularity, which imbues perception, valuation, and the emotions with meaning; embodiment therefore must be recognized as shaped in specific, highly customized normative ways. Humans care as much about losing their particularistic forms of existence as they care about death itself. Second, a physical interpretation of threat tends to ignore the investment that people put into commitments that must be born over time. We care about things that are constructed from the past (communal history, ancestors) and projected into the future (future generations, our society's survival). Other theoretical tools can better capture the time dimension of what people as political actors will feel and be motivated to do. The importance of pain, fear of death, and loss of vital means for existence cannot be denied, but the normative angle deserves exploration in its own terms.
However, let me first briefly take up the most salient contemporary non-material treatments of threat – the role of images of ‘the other’ and the need to construct identity through difference. Some analyses accentuate discourses of the other and the images and schemas deployed to generate threat sensations; other analyses go deeper to examine the needs of identity. This wide-ranging body of work encompasses IR theory, political theory, social psychology, communications and rhetoric, among others.2 The focus on images and discourse shows the power of ideas in a public sphere to form identity and motivate action. People are vulnerable to deployment of fear and hate-inducement through schemas and words; in situations of crisis, they search for simple answers and courses of action. While it is certainly the case that visual and discursive cues mobilize people, we need to ask more questions about surface-level constructions.3 What political psychological factors create the experience and conscious conception of uncertainty and security dilemmas?4 Even if one is inclined to render people passive and gullible in contexts of crises (as many studies of propaganda do), we must be wary of interpreting perceptions as mechanical psychological reactions. When people are willing to go to war and sacrifice themselves against threats, broader normative issues would seem to be at stake.
The study of identity offers another explanation of the genesis of threat. For instance, David Campbell, in Writing Security, rejects the emphasis of realism on danger as an objective condition, and interprets threat perception as a response to identity needs. He reads the history of US foreign policy as an American quest for identity guided by an almost cultural genetics to repeatedly construct hostile protagonists. The cold war for example is not ‘an externally induced crisis’ but ‘another episode in the on-going production and reproduction of American identity through the practices of foreign policy … the nexus of internal and external threats was so ubiquitous that “it was writ large on the birth certificate of the United States of America,” ’ (Campbell 1992, 145). Campbell's argument for the role of identity in shaping responses to an international environment is convincing. Its weakness comes in the emphasis on difference as explaining threat construction. One core argument in the book runs as follows: identity requires difference; difference projects danger; hence, state identity must always be premised upon the production of danger (threats). This approach too easily links difference with threat. We need to ask when threat will be activated by difference and how people within a state (or a political body) collectively come to experience a particular different other as a threat. Campbell's work indicates that threat becomes activated when, because of evolving features of society – economic, political, and cultural – a void opens up in the imagination of the whole about ‘who we are’ and to fill this void, people fixate on another group as a defining danger. Inevitably, some groups become the focus of antipathy as means to perform identity in order to constitute a secure self in the face of the void of disorder and chaos. While particular identities are never to be viewed as essential and immutable, the necessity of danger itself for the constitution of the state is taken as essential.5 Campbell highlights the dichotomies used to categorize the state and its opponent: inside/outside, self/other, rational/irrational, true/false, good/evil, order/disorder, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, etc. These symbolic dichotomies create a clear ordering of the world into two domains and through this performative representation of the political body, they consolidate members’ actual experience of threat. Campbell's work amply shows the importance of identity, but it places too much stress on difference. (In many cases, in fact, heightened differentiation follows threat – the narcissism of small differences principle being an example of this.) Identity does serve as a lightening rod or catalyst for sensations of danger, but this will more often happen when and because a group's understanding of its identity is tied to basic orders or states of the world that are being disrupted. Campbell's study, like other treatments of identity in this genre, point to the need to examine the role of the frameworks – normative orders – within which identities are located.
Rejecting physical harm and identity difference as sufficient to explain threat, I offer an alternative in the conception of normative threat. The case for this idea is made stronger if we first elaborate the role of a collective point of view in threat perception, to which I now turn.
The perceiver of threat: a people as a body politic
The concept of normative threat in the abstract is one that individual leaders or individual persons can hold in their minds, but the distinct nature of normative threat is grasped when it is understood to come from many persons taken together and applied to features that anchor the collective life of those persons as a group. To make the case for normative threat, then, we are led to consider what it means to say that a political body perceives harm to itself. Everyday language portrays political bodies as the agents and antagonists in relation to threat.6 The substantive content of what the participants in a political entity view as endangered cannot usually be reduced to strategic interest, individual physical harm, or some cartoon image of collective identity. When persons as members of a collective body together feel harm to themselves they register this sensation about something that they jointly value and desire to maintain. This section then aims to show the inherent importance of looking at a people's point of view in grasping normative threat. This is more than a matter of including public opinion as one more piece of the puzzle. Rather, I provide the conceptual basis for treating the perception of harm in a non-individualist form because it helps to make sense of why normative dislocation will be concretely and emotionally alarming.
Experiences and beliefs about normative orders are at the foundation of many perceptions of danger. Locke described a political psychology of harm relative to being part of a collectivity in his analysis of the right to punish criminals in a state of nature and in his justification of the right of a people to resist a tyrant:
[T]he Offender [i.e. the “threat”] declares himself to live by another Rule, than that of reason and common Equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of Men, for their mutual security: and so he becomes dangerous to Mankind, the tye, which is to secure them from injury and violence, being slighted and broken by him. Which being a trespass against the whole Species, and the Peace and Safety of it…
and later
[I]t [is] as impossible for one or a few oppressed Men to disturb the Government, where the Body of the People do not think themselves concerned in it, as for a raving mad Man, or heady Male-content to overturn a well-settled State; the People being as little apt to follow the one, as the other…But if the illegal Acts have extended to the Majority of the People; or if the Mischief and Oppression has light only on some few, but in such Cases, as the Precedent, and consequences seem to threaten all they are perswaded in their Consciences, that their Laws, and with them their Estates, Liberties, and Lives are in danger, and perhaps their Religion too, how they will be hindered from resisting illegal force, used against them, I cannot tell. (Locke 1988, 272 and 404; emphasis added).
Here, Locke emphasized a level of experience and reasoning which only makes sense of persons as members of a political body with beliefs about a shared order of right, which as a whole could be injured and violated. The offender, or threat, trespasses against ‘all’ when it displays its intent to overturn basic rules of justice, and persons react to the possible danger directed at their common fate.7
There are reasons that the people's view should be incorporated in a fuller theory of threat per se, not solely to substantiate the argument I make here for a normative type. The threat-related literature in international relations and foreign policy tends to telescope the political body into the perspective of the leader or elite, with the people relegated to minor dramatic roles of chorus and sacrifice, cynical voyeurs, or naïve audience. This orientation was probably more accurate in the past than now, after democratic mobilization, revolutions, and global technology, and communication have radically changed the dynamic of political perception and reaction. Elites may still play the most prominent part in funneling political action, but they are also intimately bound to the dynamics of the public. Leaders must take their cue and respond to people's emotion and opinion. As a participant in the Vietnam War described the attitude of generals during the war, emphasizing the importance of the public's reaction: ‘They [the generals].... recognized that the American national will was the single greatest factor in determining whether the outcome would be victory or not’ (McCain quoted in Goldberg 2008). In democracies, as well as more obliquely in autocratic polities, some measure of accountability to the people is necessary and expected. Leaders are not free agents, explicable primarily on the basis of their individual volition, power, or interests.8 They come out of an environment and are part of a mindset, acting out a role with defined parameters, and they are required to present their decisions and reasoning to a broad and usually diverse public, hence are highly constrained by the order and the public sphere in which they operate.9
However, the public's response exerts force not only via pressure on leaders. More fluid avenues for political mobilization have opened through new technologies, Internet communication, websites acting as public forums, amplified by television images. One writer examining the importance of ‘grass-roots statecraft’ comments: ‘To the extent that the high politics of foreign policy are understood to emerge from the state in a “single voice”, dissenting voices are minimized or ignored as not possessing the data needed to make an “informed” and “objective” judgment….[T]he question of the “legitimacy” of citizens’ actions … begs the empirical observation: Citizens’ groups are increasingly involved in the foreign policy process’ (Marsh 1995, 126–27). Persons come together, linked on a variety of bases, for non-territorial purposes, to identify and form groups. The fragmentation and activation of mass opinion is often driven by normatively perceived aims and threats. It should be noted that the power of normative threat in international relations is not solely located at the level of people as a political body. Leaders as well may be moved by normative order: Hitler's obsession with Jews was a leader's point of view of normative order, then elaborated into a general political and social drive. Nevertheless, the concreteness and stakes of normative threat are grounded in a plurality of people coming together to create a whole that can be endangered.