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* Thanks for the comments on an earlier draft of this paper to: Kirsten Ainley, Roy Allison, Aron Ammon, Andreas Antonides, Jens Bartleson, Chris Brown, Mick Cox, Ulrik Pram Gad, Stefano Guzzini, Birthe Hansen, Lene Hansen, Kim Hutchings, Morten Kelstrup, Andrew Linklater, Noel Parker, Karen Lund Petersen, John Sidel, Karen Smith, Jaap de Wilde, Anders Wivel and several anonymous reviewers.
Introduction
International security is usually presented as a complex mosaic of separate agendas and multiple issues, with each political unit pursuing its own egotistical interests, constructing its own threats, and making temporary alliances as and when necessary. This is the realist view of the self-help consequences of life under anarchy, and Europe during the eighteenth century was an exemplar of this condition. But sometimes, international security is structured by one over-arching conflict, as it was most strikingly during the Cold War. At such times a higher order of securitisation embeds itself in such a way as to incorporate, align and rank the more parochial securitisations beneath it. Thus during the Cold War whatever securitisations existed between, say, Japan and China, or Germany and Russia, or the US and Japan, were all subordinated to, or at least framed within, the overarching construction of the grand struggle between East and West. More parochial concerns took second place to a general ideological and power struggle over how the future political economy of humankind was to be organised. The very few exceptions to this dominance (for example, the bilateral feuding of the Greeks and Turks within NATO) were striking enough to show the overall power and pervasiveness of the Cold War framing. The relevance of such higher-level securitisations is not just historical. After September 11th 2001 (9/11) the Bush (and Blair) administrations tried to do something similar with the so-called 'Global War on Terror' (GWoT). The contemporary discourse about climate change increasingly also takes this higher-level form, and examples from earlier ages include the Crusades (mobilising in the name of a 'universal' religion), and the 18th and 19th century mobilisation of monarchies against the threat of republicanism.
The purpose of this article is to revisit the securitisation theory of the Copenhagen school to see how to bring it into focus on these higher...