Introduction
Emotional communities are all around us, whether we take a church congregation, supporters of a particular sports team, or the profession of medical doctors. What links these communities conceptually is a collective understanding of its basic emotional appraisals and their appropriate expression. In a church congregation, members share ‘good’ emotions of charity and compassion while trying to overcome ‘bad’ emotions like greed or selfishness.Footnote 1 Supporters of Manchester United are united in their common (and often lively) expression of adoration and admiration for their team, and (sometimes violent) show of distaste for rivalling teams. In the American Medical Association, members share a professional understanding that it is appropriate to suppress emotions like caring or compassion in order to separate themselves from the emotional suffering of their patients.Footnote 2
In world politics, human rights activists form transnational advocacy networks because they are emotionally moved by human stories of suffering and distress and, in turn, use the same logic to move other people and governments to action.Footnote 3Al-Qaeda is an emotional community in which its members glorify and mourn martyrdom and are united by their expression of (violent) anger and hatred against Western liberal values. The members of the European Union (EU) share an emotional history of grief and trauma rooted in the destructive effects of two major wars.Footnote 4 It is argued that all of these social groups can be understood as emotional communities, that is, ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’.Footnote 5
Emotional communities have been studied, in one form or another, in History, Psychology, and Sociology. To my knowledge, however, its usage in International Relations (IR) remains void. This article invites the reader to view world politics as a set of parallel and often overlapping emotional communities. Specifically, this article deals with the emotional foundations of inter-allied conflict management by studying one particular type of emotional community: a (pluralistic) security community.Footnote 6 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) typically serves as a textbook example of a security community, whereby a security community is considered to be ‘a group which has become integrated, where integration is defined as the attainment of a sense of community, accompanied by formal or informal institutions or practices, sufficiently strong and widespread to assure peaceful change among members of a group with “reasonable” certainty over a “long” period of time’.Footnote 7
The main argument raised here is that emotion norms stabilise security communities during inter-allied conflict. Emotion norms emerge from behavioural confirmation or disconfirmation and guide people to display emotions to fit a socially defined situation.Footnote 8 For example, the loss of human lives on 11 September 2001 is a situation where grief and sorrow are appropriate. Understanding security communities as emotional (security) communities that are guided by collectively shared emotion norms furthers our knowledge about the internal mechanisms within these groups and contributes to a wider debate in IR about the sociological and emotional foundation of world politics.Footnote 9
A number of researchers have studied the role of emotions, affect, and feelings in IR.Footnote 10 Emotions have been traditionally regarded in the social sciences as confused (often violent) bodily motions that prevent any self-reflection about one's conduct.Footnote 11 Cognitivist theory argues instead that the expression of emotions is a moral act that is based on a cognitive appraisal of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.Footnote 12 Norbert Elias, for example, acknowledges that rational forms of social behaviour may account for much in world politics.Footnote 13 However, he argues that analysing rational behaviour and thought processes in isolation or as a mechanism that is meant to control drives and affects is bound to remain static and incomplete. Rationalist conceptions like interests are only one manifestation of behaviour in world politics among many. What matters, according to Elias, are the balances and conflicts (the figurations) between interests and emotions. Building on Elias, Thomas J. Scheff and Erving Goffman argue in a similar way that overemphasis of self-control and self-awareness tends to neglect the emotional basis of human behaviour.Footnote 14 Thus, far from being peripheral or unknowable, emotions form an integral part of social and cultural development. Building on this line of research, this article defines emotions as moral judgments that reflect an intellectual appraisal of present expectations and past experience rather than energetic impulses and passions.
The article is structured into three parts. First, it explains the concept of emotional community. Second, it develops a conceptual framework for a particular type of emotional community in IR, namely a (pluralistic) security community. In this context, the article distinguishes between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ emotion norms of an emotional (security) community. Third, this conceptual framework is applied empirically to the case of transatlantic conflict over NATO's military intervention in Libya in 2011. The case study shows how emotion norms stabilised the community on the inside as well as on the outside during a period of inter-allied conflict. The article concludes with some general implications for the study of world politics and outlines a tentative agenda for further research.
Emotion norms and community
The concept of emotional community was originally developed by Barbara Rosenwein.Footnote 15 Rosenwein looks at how emotional communities formed and vanished during the Early Middle Ages and shows how these communities emotionally linked together a particular group of actors through the expression of a particular set of collectively shared emotions. Related to this is Gandhi's conceptualisation of how affective communities forged strong bonds among marginalised groups united against imperialism.Footnote 16 Emotion norms, on the other hand, are a primary concern of the sociology of emotions. Arlie R. Hochschild, for example, develops the idea of ‘feeling rules’ that determine what emotions are considered to be good or bad in a given social group.Footnote 17 William M. Reddy argues that emotional expressions such as emotional talk and gestures are ‘performative speech acts’ that possess a transformative character in social relationships.Footnote 18 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns introduce ‘emotionology’ as a useful term to capture collective emotional standards in social groups as opposed to individual emotional experience.Footnote 19 Connecting emotions to the study of peace, G. M. White shows that emotion norms play an important role in resolving conflict peacefully within communities, for example in South Pacific cultures.Footnote 20 What these approaches all have in common is that they treat emotions as moral judgments about proper behaviour. They claim that the vast and loose array of ambivalent and inconsistent emotions can be managed and controlled through institutionalised and intersubjectively shared emotional guidelines and conventions that can be learnt and expressed according to a given social situation.Footnote 21 In sum, they treat emotion norms as contributing to establishing and maintaining social ties and stability among members of a particular group.
An emotional community rests on shared ‘fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression’ that can be methodologically traced through similar emotional styles and discourse.Footnote 22 Emotion norms thus provide the emotional fingerprint that makes one emotional community distinguishable from other emotional communities. Similar emotional styles and discourse do not necessarily require similar or even identical interests.Footnote 23 The members of an emotional community may (and often do) disagree on a variety of issues. What remains important is that, in resolving their conflicts, members follow the use and expression of properly agreed emotion norms, for example, when and how anger is an acceptable form of emotional expression. In such communities emotions do not ‘float freely’ but are managed by its members in a way that makes them more reliable.Footnote 24 Emotional communities thus limit the availability of particular emotional expressions in a given situation and their impact on proper behaviour. Finally, emotional communities may overlap and some members may be part of several emotional communities at the same time.Footnote 25 The following sections of this article deal with one particular type of emotional community in world politics, namely a (pluralistic) security community.
The conceptual foundations of emotional (security) communities
The obvious challenge is to isolate the conditions under which an emotional (security) community operates. To answer this challenge the article builds deductively from what we know about security communities based on the literature and compare these findings with what has emerged from the study of emotions in IR.
Building in part on Émile Durkheim's work on rituals as well as Goffman's interaction order, it is argued that most social groups and individuals in international politics actively seek the company of emotionally like-minded others and are thus in principle able to form emotional communities.Footnote 26 For example, international diplomacy can be viewed as a broad emotional community based on a commonly agreed emotion norm (norm of emotional restraint) and performed to produce symbolic meanings and to establish social hierarchy, status, and power. Furthermore, according to Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, the presence of emotional bonds among members of a social group generates collective meaning and identity.Footnote 27 The presence of emotional bonds – ‘a matter of mutual sympathy and loyalties, of “we-feeling”, trust and mutual consideration’ – also plays a significant role in a security community.Footnote 28 A number of IR scholars have recently widened the concept of interstate trust by exploring its emotional basis.Footnote 29 Linking their work to the study of security communities, it is further argued that emotional bonds contribute to mutual identification and trust in a security community.
Based on what we already know about the role of emotions in IR and insights generated from the study of emotion norms and emotional community, two tentative assumptions will be made about the conceptual framework of emotional (security) communities. First, members are able to recognise the positive moral character and benevolent behaviour of significant Others. Eliot R. Smith shows how community members identify and admire the emotional character of fellow members and imitate them in their own behaviour, internalise group-level emotions, and share these collective emotions in their dealings with the outside world.Footnote 30 Similar processes can be witnessed in a security community. In a security community, members have established intergovernmental and people-to-people-ties with open channels of communication that help them to respond to and manage each other's needs and communicate appropriate emotions to defuse the destructive potential of inter-member conflict.
Second, the consolidation of a security community rests not exclusively on the self-perpetuating role of ‘positive’ emotions but also on the stabilising function of ‘negative’ emotions.Footnote 31 Agents sanction the emotional indifference or non-conformity of fellow members through emotional mechanisms that seek to erase the sources of discord (for example, expression of anger, stigmatisation, consensus-building negotiations, persuasion). Such negative emotional reactions do not necessarily herald the disintegration of the security community but often signal closeness among its members and display their emotional attachment to the community as opposed to behaving indifferent.Footnote 32
Based on these tentative assumptions, it is argued that emotion norms provide an affective glue that helps security community members stick together and that contributes to stabilise the social order within these communities. The following subsections will further elaborate on these assumptions by outlining three conditions for emotional (security) communities.
Rituals and symbols
In a security community, the mutual experience and communication of shared emotions can be said to create feelings of mutual belonging and contributes to an affectionate state of solidarity. The social locus for sharing these feelings is the performance of solidarity rituals. A ritual is understood as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’.Footnote 33 Rituals involve the physical assembly of the members of a social group, their awareness and focus on a common object or action, and the sharing of similar emotions through their expression and discourse toward these objects or action.Footnote 34 Such symbolic rituals produce so called ‘high-order meanings’ that lead to mutual identification between Self and Other.Footnote 35
Rituals thus function as mechanisms to synchronise individual emotional states, to define social roles and status, commit members to future actions and sharpen the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.Footnote 36 This takes place through properly performed and standardised verbal and gestural emotional expressions that ultimately draw the community members closer together. Rituals are thus fundamental to maintaining stable emotional communities because they make members aware of their membership. Durkheim describes this process: ‘It is no longer a single individual speaking, rather it is a group incarnate and personified.’Footnote 37 When we look at the concept of security community, similar mechanisms can be found there as well. These involve shared experience and communication, mutual understanding and trust, a sense of ‘we-ness’, and a sense of boundary toward outsiders.Footnote 38 Symbolic rituals in a security community (for example, NATO summits, joint military exercises, or commemorating events) create high-order meanings necessary to maintain social order and collective identity.
Symbolism plays an important part in these rituals. Symbols may be defined as ‘orders to recall something from memory’.Footnote 39 Deutsch underlines the importance of symbols in a security community: ‘By noting which symbols are frequently associated with each other, we may learn something about the context in which political messages are perceived, remembered, and recalled on later occasions’.Footnote 40 Symbols contribute to identify political meanings in a given situation. Empirically, symbols are traceable in different forms such as abstract symbols (words, ideas, slogans), pictorial symbols (codes of arms, flags), personal or human symbols (heroes, leaders, saints, prophets), or symbolic places (capital cities, historic sites, national shrines, centers of pilgrimage).Footnote 41
Second, symbols perform a representational function by designating a certain group to form collective emotional memories and experiences. In other words, symbols are meaningless unless people grow emotionally attached to them. For example, what it means to be an American evokes a certain conceptual idea of ‘we-feeling’ only among those that can emotionally relate to it. Those that identify themselves as ‘Americans’ share a distinct pattern of collective emotional attachment that is manifested in recurring rituals such as Fourth of July celebrations, presidential inaugurations, and the pledge of allegiance as well as worshiping places and objects with symbolic significance such as the Declaration of Independence or the Lincoln Memorial.Footnote 42 More negative examples that show that the process of binding people together often works in tandem with pernicious representations of Others include the Nazi efforts to install collective emotions through a variety of resentment and hate strategies and the extensive use of collective symbols and rituals.
Symbols play an important role in solidarity rituals at the intergovernmental and transnational level such as speeches, summits, ceremonies, youth exchanges or festivals that contribute to maintaining an emotional community. In a Durkheimian sense, the symbolic meaning of a particular object or person acts as a prism that concentrates the particular emotional ‘colors’ of individual group members into a collective bundle of shared emotional meanings. In a security community ‘individuals are reminded of what values the group sanctions, how they are able to orient emotionally to those values, and what the consequences will be if they are violated’.Footnote 43 In this sense, symbolic rituals reaffirm existing emotion norms by reducing the complexity of emotional expressions and by managing emotional expressions and communication.
Knowledge and power
Conceptualising security communities as emotional communities does not render questions of power irrelevant. Members exercise power over outsiders through selective membership as well as over insiders by expressing ‘negative’ emotions such as anger in cases of non-compliance. Power, of course, derives not only from material sources such as military force, size of a country's population and territory, its economic performance, and natural resources but also from non-material sources such as human resources and organising skills, ideas, knowledge, access to and processing of information, social experience, and political institutions as well as history and culture.Footnote 44 Deutsch and his associates refer to the former kind as ‘power’ while they term the latter kind ‘responsiveness’.Footnote 45 Adler makes a similar distinction between the material resources to accomplish certain goals (power) and the authority to define collective meanings and practices (knowledge).Footnote 46 While both material and non-material sources of power are important in a security community, scholars studying the subject agree that knowledge (understood as creating shared meanings) plays a crucial role in a security community.Footnote 47
Understanding security communities as emotional communities points to the epistemological centrality of emotional knowledge. Emotional knowledge is an agent's ability to cognitively and morally categorise emotional expressions and to emotionally connect these affective categories to Others’ identities based on experience over time.Footnote 48 In other words, members have to be able to know what it means to be angry, ashamed, or happy in order to understand its social implications and evoke appropriate emotional reactions toward others within a particular social situation based on previous experience and moral judgments.Footnote 49 For example, anger can be interpreted as destructive to close relationships because one may have experienced the destructive nature of anger in previous relationships. At the same time, anger may be perceived as displaying the closeness of a relationship based on a very different emotional experience.
Emotional knowledge is based on intersubjective learning, that is, the habituated establishment and recurring exchange of emotions that shape the identities of social actors. One member communicates emotions to other members who then give emotional feedback and, in turn, receive emotional feedback on their part, and so on. Through this perpetuating process of emotional socialisation, members of an emotional (security) community can enter a stage of understanding by building a common emotional history together which contributes to the establishment of shared meanings and even trust.Footnote 50 In sum, emotional knowledge is about orientation and meaning. It is the accumulation of memories, founding myths, experiences, and symbolic patterns that enables members to make sense of the world around them within an emotionally shared reality.Footnote 51
Process sociology has shown how emotional knowledge forms part of asymmetries of power and status in which ‘established’ groups secure the compliance of outsiders.Footnote 52 Insiders maintain and reproduce a particular self-image of social superiority vis-à-vis outsiders based on group charisma and emotional knowledge (feeling of social superiority/pride). At the same time, established groups persuade outsiders to internalise feelings of social inferiority (shame) through emotional rigidity, stigmatisation, and by placing the contact of insiders with outsiders under a taboo. Accordingly, contact with outsiders is associated with negative feelings. Through these figuration processes, ‘inside’ groups exercise and maintain a power asymmetry that is rooted in emotional knowledge.Footnote 53
Inside an emotional (security) community, members are not treated as approximate equals but are woven together in asymmetrical power relationships. The self-image of the established group is formed based on the minority of its ‘best’ members (core group). This core group performs a norm building function and exercises power over potential or actual norm breakers through control and stigmatisation.Footnote 54 Members can only participate in an emotional community by complying with certain emotional patterns of affect control. Members who do not comply by siding with or showing sympathy toward outsider groups will risk losing their power and status within the ‘inside’ group. In other words, the core group is able to teach and enforce emotion norms. The notion of a core group corresponds nicely with Deutsch's notion of ‘cores of strength’ within a security community. Security communities develop around cores of strength that possess material and moral authority due to their superior material power, international legitimacy, and acquired norms and practices.Footnote 55 In the transatlantic (emotional) security community, it seems fair to suggest that the US forms such a core.
In sum, processes of emotional socialisation involving power and status are constantly present in an emotional (security) community and reproduced through knowledge: less superior members assimilate in relation to more powerful core groups, rivalling other members for status and power, shaping and reshaping their emotional experience and group charisma, or responding in ways that satisfy other members.Footnote 56 Hence, emotional knowledge and power are interwoven: communicating and transferring emotional knowledge within and between groups constitutes and maintains power relationships.
Collective identification and trust
Ritualised and symbolic interaction generates emotional knowledge and understanding. However, the ability to recognise that, how, and what the other is feeling is still a long way from feeling with another agent. Without the ability to emotionally connect with others, mutual understanding as the basis of interstate trust remains sketchy at best. The presence of shared emotions may simply be a coinciding event. For example, two political leaders may laugh about the same joke or pick up an infectious smile. Even though this feeling along with each other may lead to sympathy, it does not generate collective action based on empathy.Footnote 57 In other words, simply responding to the emotions of others is not to be mistaken for responsiveness in a security community. In the former case, the Self simply picks up the emotions of the Other by making it their own. In the latter case, the Self identifies with the Other by feeling exactly the same kind of emotions. Empathy thus requires sharing the same emotions by ‘placing oneself psychologically in that other person's circumstance’.Footnote 58 Feelings of empathy can also be found in a security community. Take for example, the emotional solidarity expressed within the transatlantic security community in the aftermath of 9/11. When the United States faced a collective trauma on 11 September 2001, NATO members expressed spontaneous and sincere positive emotions. 200,000 took the streets of Berlin to show their solidarity with the United States. In Britain, the US National Anthem was played during the change of guard in front of Buckingham Palace.
In a mature (pluralistic) security community like NATO, members will be more inclined to share their emotions with each other simply because they trust each other. Community members will then tend to express similar emotions in a given situation. Michel's conception of trust is helpful here. He distinguishes between trust as an emotive disposition, which precedes cooperative behaviour, on the one hand, and strategic trust, on the other hand (which he calls ‘reliance’), which follows from cooperative behaviour.Footnote 59 A similar account is presented by Booth and Wheeler who distinguish between functional ‘trust-as-predictability’ and emotional ‘trust-as-bond’.Footnote 60 The latter conception of trust thus represents an emotive and moralistic disposition: ‘Trust emerges here as a moralistic disposition which guides and influences behavior by structuring our engagement with the world’.Footnote 61 This conception of trust-as-bond mirrors the main argument about the binding role of emotions in an emotional security community. Since trust-as-bond is based on normative rather than strategic cooperation, harming strategic trust (reliance) will result in mere disappointment without questioning the meaning of action. The loss of emotive trust, on the contrary, will generate feelings of betrayal, which shake the foundations of community. In other words, a perceived betrayal by members of the emotional (security) community would result in much deeper and intense emotions (anger) than feelings of disagreement or disappointment (I will return to this point below). In sum, the link between trust and the idea of an emotional connection among members of an emotional (security) community is based on a member's moral judgment of the overall integrity and character of a particular other member expressed through the empathetic sharing of emotion norms.
Counterarguments and alternative explanations
This degree of mutual identification and trust in an emotional (security) community requires norms about acceptable and appropriate emotional expressions that will be specified in the following section. Prior to this, it seems necessary to engage with possible counterarguments and alternative explanations in order to lay out explicitly the specific contributions of emotions as explanatory factors in a security community.
Janice Bially Mattern, for example, argues persuasively that identity can be a source of order in security communities during crises. According to her argument, member states can use language power or representational force to repair or recreate a broken-down identity. By representational force, Bially Mattern means ‘a forceful but non-physical form of power exercised through language’ that leaves a victim with the non-choice between suffering and compliance.Footnote 62 In this sense, Bially Mattern offers a similar analysis yet entirely different explanation of security communities in crises. To be fair, Bially Mattern does not deny that identity also includes emotional bonds. Yet, her analysis centers on configurations of sociolinguistic identity in which a security community is stabilised during crises through the strategic use of forceful language or ‘linguistic guns’.Footnote 63
The argument in this article, on the contrary, revolves around configurations of socioemotional identity in which a security community is stabilised during crises through the expression of appropriate emotions in a given situation. While it is true that such emotions can be expressed through discourse, identity in an emotional security community is not represented by language but by the emotion norms communicated through language. In this sense, the article views identity not as a sociolinguistic but instead as a socioemotional construct.
Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argue that security communities are ‘communities of practice as they tacitly practice peaceful change’ through background knowledge or habitus.Footnote 64 These authors view practices as the natural and self-evident way of solving inter-state disputes in a security community at the exclusion of violent practices. From this perspective, the non-representational dimension of trust as one of the key constitutive factors of a security community derives directly from common practices and thus becomes the habitus or background knowledge of this community. Pouliot goes even further to argue that practices are the ‘engine of social action’ and constitute peace as a social reality in a security community being thus prior to instrumental rationality, norm compliance, or communicative action.Footnote 65
The logic of practice as articulated by Adler and Pouliot, however, does not grant emotions the role of a separate explanatory factor in analysing security communities. In fact, in his earlier work, Adler explicitly states: ‘To grasp the process by which mutual responsiveness develops in pluralistic security communities, we must understand community not as a matter of feelings, emotions, and affection, but as a cognitive process through which common identities are created’.Footnote 66 Also, the logic of practice emphasises the non-representational dimension of trust in a security community. By contrast, the concept of emotional (security) community finds itself within the ‘representational bias’ pointed out by Pouliot as opposed to the logic of practice because the concept of emotional (security) community stresses the importance of collective emotional standards and norms, which it defines as representations of prior moral judgments.Footnote 67
Ted Hopf uses the security community concept to illustrate how the logic of habit predominates among a particular group of states. His conception differs somewhat from Adler's and Pouliot's account: ‘A security community of habit is less reflective, purposive, agential, and normative than a security community of practice.’Footnote 68 Hopf treats emotions and habits as almost interchangeable concepts and argues that, ‘security community members expectations are also reinforced by habits of affect … that blocks reflective consideration of one's responses to their actions, ensuring a reinforcing spiral of amity’.Footnote 69 According to Hopf, habitualised emotions of amity thus make a security community more stable.
At first glance, Hopf's assumptions appear to be similar to the dynamics occurring in emotional (security) communities. There are, however, a number of important distinctions to be made that clearly separate emotion norms from emotional habits. First of all, the logic of habit (similar to the logic of practice) assumes that security communities are ‘not to be based on trust’.Footnote 70 By contrast, trust (based on mutual identification) constitutes one of three conditions of emotional security communities outlined above. Second, emotional communities are based on collective learning. The logic of habit, on the contrary, is ‘the antithesis of learning’ because learning requires a reflectiveness denied by habit.Footnote 71 Third, and for the same reason, the logic of habit excludes any form of ‘moral calculations’.Footnote 72 In this article, it is argued instead that, in emotional security communities the expression of emotions is a moral act that is based on a cognitive appraisal of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. More precisely, the article defines emotions as moral judgments that reflect an intellectual appraisal of present expectations and past experience. Such moral appraisals and judgments presuppose a reflectiveness that stands in contrast to both the logic of practice as well as the logic of habit, which emphasise ‘automatic perceptions, attitudes and responses’.Footnote 73 Finally, the logics of habit and practice fundamentally depart from the logic of consequence and the logic of appropriateness ‘by stressing that the actions of actors in the world are often not the product of deliberate calculation of any sort, instrumental or normative’.Footnote 74 While emotional security communities also depart from the logic of consequence, they can still be said to operate within the logic of appropriateness by stressing the role of emotion norms.
Finally, Lucille Eznack argues persuasively that affect influences inter-allied relations and explains how affects during a situation of crisis can be viewed as ‘signals of strength’ rather than heralding the demise of that cooperative relationship. She illustrates her point by using the cases of Britain and the United States during the Suez crisis in 1956 as well as of France and the United States during the Iraq crisis in 2003 and by contrasting these bilateral cases to the relationship between Turkey and the United States in 2003.Footnote 75 Eznack's argument shares some commonalities with my own argument in the sense that we both view affect and emotions to be essential for understanding why crises occur among allies in general and within NATO in particular, and focus on political leaders as the affective embodiment of such interstate relationships. Moreover, Eznack identifies norm violations as a mechanism that triggers strong emotional reactions and concludes that such reactions contribute to repairing the ‘relational culture’ among close allies.Footnote 76
Apart from these commonalities, however, there are a number of important distinctions to be made. The most important difference lies in the relationship between norms and emotions. Eznack reasons that emotions function as catalysts that intensify and ‘exacerbate’ reactions to prior norm violations of appropriate social behaviour within an alliance.Footnote 77 My own argument takes a fundamentally different approach by understanding emotions as configurations that form a constitutive element of an emotional (security) community. In this sense, whereas Eznack emphasises the sociobehavioural dimension of affect in an alliance (‘norms of appropriate behavior’), my argument focuses on the socioemotional dimension of a security community (‘norms of appropriate emotions’).
Inside/outside emotion norms
Based on what we know about security communities, the emotions expressed within such communities can be expected to differ from those expressed towards outsiders.Footnote 78 The emotion norms of a security community can thus best be viewed through the prism of the inside/outside dualism.Footnote 79
It is argued that inside a security community, members value and encourage emotions that emphasise the norm of amity like empathy, pride, gratitude, grief, honor, respect, compassion, or sympathy. At the same time, they tend to discourage or show restraint toward emotional expressions that stress the norm of enmity such as fear, anger, disgust, hatred, jealousy, and rage. Outside the security community, members collectively express emotions that are compatible with the norm of enmity, such as anger or fear, toward those non-members that are perceived as threatening or incompatible with the community's ‘way of life’. What is of importance to the argument developed here is that a combination of particular emotional expressions (and their meaning) directed inwards, and reserved exclusively for the members of the emotional community, on the one hand, and particular emotional expressions directed outwards, on the other hand, contribute to the consolidation and stability of the community. For example, the transatlantic security community is built on the consensus that an attack on one member is an attack against all. In the event of an outside attack against a community member, all members expect each other to react with the appropriate emotional expression (sympathy with the ‘attacked’/anger at the ‘attacker’). In the case of 9/11, for example, such collective emotions were immediately mobilised to be in tune with the social situation. Based on this inside/outside dualism, the emotion norms of an emotional (security) community are categorised here as amity (inside) and enmity (outside).
Inside emotion norm: amity
Amity produces durable bonds, reliability, and trust in at least three ways. First, it assures a ‘distinctive way of life’ and a sense of belonging that sets the community apart from other areas and regions including the one they previously inhabited.Footnote 80 The development of such a way of life is, of course, closely related to the social construction of a collective identity, a sense of community or ‘we-feeling’ in a security community.Footnote 81 Second, amity encourages community members to respond to each other's needs, messages, and behaviour in a way that enables members to resolve their conflicts peacefully. Finally, through processes of learning the emotional expressions of community members align in a way that enables them to predict one another's intentions and, ultimately, to overcome feelings of uncertainty. This alignment of individually expressed emotions creates a background condition for peaceful interaction by developing shared meaning. In an emotional (security) community, members feel secure through an intensified emotional state of connectedness and belonging: They ‘lose their selves in the others’.Footnote 82 In sum, the norm of amity performs important functions within an emotional (security) community: It encourages mutual commitment, responsiveness, and predictability and thus contributes to the stabilisation of collective identification and mutual trust.
Amity among members of an emotional (security) community is expressed through collective feelings of empathy, pride, guilt, gratitude, grief, honor, respect, compassion, or sympathy. However, as pointed out above, in case certain members display emotional indifference or non-conformity, one would expect other members to react with anger or dislike. Such expressions of ‘negative’ emotions within a security community are perfectly compatible with the norm of amity because they carry a fundamentally different meaning than the outside emotion norm of enmity described below. Members, due to the emotional knowledge established over time, are able to differentiate between both meanings. While the former kind of anger is meant to increase the gap between insiders and outsiders the latter kind signals closeness and emotional attachment to the community in order to repair an internal state of crisis.Footnote 83
Shame constitutes the corresponding feeling to anger in an emotional (security) community. It signals the presence of a moral trespass and a threatened bond. Shame and embarrassment indicate dissatisfaction with one's impression in the eyes of other members based on a negative response.Footnote 84 Thus, shame in response to anger monitors and regulates the degree of unity and division within the community: Once shame is acknowledged social bonds can be repaired. Denial of shame, however, results in further alienation and division.Footnote 85
Outside emotions norm: enmity
Enmity also builds trust among members of an emotional security community by setting insiders apart from outsiders and thereby generating internal cohesion. Disconnecting insiders from outsiders is an act of identity building necessary for developing and maintaining a security community.Footnote 86 In an emotional (security) community, amity and enmity are two sides of the same coin. Collective identification in a security community cannot be treated in isolation but can only be fully understood if viewed as an emotional construction of a (or multiple) shared Other(s). Such a shared Other must not exclusively be defined in strictly military terms such as an outside military threat but contains a much broader concept based on regime type (for example, democracy vs. non-democracy), cultural or religious differences (for example, Occident vs. Orient), and/or spatial concepts (for example, the Atlantic area vs. the Pacific rim). Thus, the norm of enmity must not primarily be defined in terms of material or physical coercion but rather in terms of a perceived risk or harm to the distinctive ‘way of life’ of an emotional (security) community.
It is certainly not suggested that all non-members are considered a threat in the sense that they threaten the physical survival of the inside group. It does emphasise, however, that such inside/outside figurations sharpen the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. This is particularly the case in crisis situation (such as the Libya intervention) when members of an emotional (security) community become locked into an insider-outsider dualism that is hard to disrupt and leaves little room for differentiation.Footnote 87 Neither does this figuration negate the possibility of new members to join. It does suggest, however, that these new members will enter the community not as approximate equals but as members with inferior status and power vis-à-vis established members. Underlying this power asymmetry are fears of losing identity and social cohesion on behalf of the core group.
Enmity toward outsiders is expressed through collective feelings of fear, anger, jealousy, envy, rage, dislike, hate, bravery, or courage. As laid out above, the emotional knowledge generated within an emotional (security) community helps members to distinguish between, for example, anger expressed by community members towards insiders (amity) and anger expressed by community members toward outsiders (enmity).
Building on the argument raised in the beginning, the following case study is meant to illustrate how emotion norms stabilised the transatlantic security community by diffusing the potentially damaging effects of inter-member conflict. The case study is chosen because the vote in the UNSC on Resolution 1973 represents a recent yet understudied case of transatlantic conflict management. Similar arguments could be made about other transatlantic conflicts like the Iraq crisis in 2003 or the Suez crisis in 1956. Any of these conflicts provides a formidable case study to demonstrate the presence of emotions in a security community since such situations tend to produce extreme emotional expressions that can be empirically traced and documented by the researcher.
Case study: transatlantic conflict over the Libyan intervention in 2011
NATO's military intervention against Libya in 2011 produced a number of serious conflicts within the transatlantic security community. Most notable among these conflicts was the push for greater military engagement in Libya by France and Britain as well as the refusal by Turkey to hand over command to NATO. The most serious conflict within the transatlantic security community, however, arouse over the abstaining vote on Resolution 1973 by Germany in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). UN Resolution 1973 authorised the use of military force to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya. Since the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle had previously even insisted to oppose the resolution (but was eventually persuaded by German diplomats to abstain), the vote was perceived as a ‘no’ by, France, Great Britain, and the US. It was the first time that Germany had not sided with its fellow transatlantic community members in the UNSC on a major security issue. This provoked fears on both sides of the Atlantic of German ‘nationalist calculations’ and a ‘non-alligned foreign policy’.Footnote 88 The German vote thus can be said to have had a destabilising effect on the transatlantic security community with the potential to provoke a serious crisis.
The stabilising effects of emotion norms in the transatlantic security community will be empirically traced here on the inside as well as on the outside. Accordingly, the case study is structured into two parts. First, the presence and effects of the inside emotion norm of amity will be shown by looking at how relevant community members reacted to Germany's abstention in the UNSC. Second, the case study will switch perspective by looking at how the outside emotion norm of enmity expressed by the same community members toward the Gaddafi regime equally stabilised the security community. In doing so, the case study design applies the conceptual framework of inside/outside emotion norms developed above. The empirical analysis will only look at the main parties involved in the conflict, namely Britain, France, Germany, and the US who are NATO member states and were also members of the UNSC in 2011. In addition, the analysis will focus on elite discourse among political leaders. Political leaders are defined here as ‘responsible decision-makers’ having a political mandate in one form or another which includes heads of state, heads of governments, cabinet members, and other elected representatives.Footnote 89 Since political leaders are publicly mandated representatives of their respective state one would expect them to internalise (at least to a significant extent) the emotion norms of the emotional (security) community.Footnote 90
It is fair to suggest that many political leaders may simply not show their ‘true’ emotions unless it is politically opportune. Thus, the emotional expressions (or lack thereof) on the surface may not necessarily reflect what these individuals feel underneath. Obviously, it is impossible to look into the heads of political decision-makers – be it interests, ideas, or emotions and this article is no exception to that. Even though these limitations are real they do not make the empirical analysis irrelevant. The main task of this article is to show that emotions have a binding role in social arrangements at different levels of world politics. It is thus less interested in emotional patterns within individual political leaders but more inclined to trace emotional patterns between individual political leaders and the societies they represent. This conception can be based on Elias concept of ‘figuration’: ‘The social fabric and its historical change are not chaotic but possess, even in phases of greatest unrest and disorder, a clear pattern and structure. To investigate the totality … does not mean to study each individual process within it. It means first of all to discover the basic structures which give all the individual processes … their direction and their specific stamp.’Footnote 91 A similar argument can be found in the concept of emotionology cited above, which distinguishes the collective emotional standards from personal emotional experiences.Footnote 92
Amity
The decision for military intervention in Libya was controversial among NATO members from the very start. With France and Britain actively pushing for military enforcement of a no-fly zone to protect the Libyan opposition, the United States and Germany (along with others) remained at first sceptical of fighting another war in the region. In March 2011, however, the US changed its position when it became clear that a humanitarian crisis in the city of Benghazi was immanent. In addition, the Arab League came out in support of a no-fly zone, and Security Council veto powers China and Russia signalled that they would not block a UN resolution to authorise the use of military force. Germany, in contrast to its NATO allies in the UNSC, held on to its position not to become a war party in Northern Africa opting instead for more far-reaching economic and financial sanctions against the Gaddafi regime.
The German abstention in the UNSC on March 17 must have been a shock to political leaders in France, Britain, and the US because Germany could have supported the resolution without automatically having to contribute troops. The symbolic meaning of the abstaining vote thus proved to be much more destabilising than the material lack of German military capabilities. As an important member of the transatlantic security community, Germany had, for the first time, openly sided with non-members like China, Russia, Brazil, and India in the UNSC on a significant security issue leaving France, Britain, and the US isolated. What shook the community's foundation was thus less Germany's refusal to participate in the military intervention – many NATO member countries chose not to participate militarily – but Germany's refusal to offer political and moral support for the mission. As a result, Germany's symbolic move was interpreted as an open display of emotional indifference, an undermining of solidarity and trust or, bluntly speaking, as ‘a stab in the back’.
In defending its position, Germany was quick to point out that its decision to abstain on UN Resolution 1973 was not to be mistaken with indifference or even sympathy for the Gaddafi regime.Footnote 93 Instead, Germany portrayed its decision as a rational choice, a process of logical reasoning, a ‘difficult evaluation process … of weighing up the pros and cons’.Footnote 94 The underlying emotional motives of the German decision-making process – the ‘concerns and fears about the consequences of a military operation’ based on Germany's ‘painful experience’ in the past – were, at least initially, sidelined in public declarations and speeches.Footnote 95
Disappointed by the emotional indifference expressed by Germany, NATO members could hardly conceal their anger at the German government. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé was rather polite when he said that, ‘I would have liked to see us accompanied by Germany.’ Anonymous voices in the French diplomatic service spoke more bluntly of a German ‘mistake with unpredictable political consequences’ and a ‘crisis’ within NATO. Echoing French diplomats, the French newspaper Le Monde wrote ‘the German government is lacking solidarity or any maturity’. The French magazine Le Parisien even quoted a French diplomat who directly attacked the German Chancellor: ‘Our relationship is getting markedly colder … Angela Merkel will have to pay for this!’ These statements clearly reveal that French policymakers no longer viewed Germany as an equal and instead attempted to coerce and seek revenge.Footnote 96 This notion is further substantiated by Le Figaro, which cites another French diplomat who calls the German UNSC abstention ‘a severe blow to the Franco-German friendship’. Another statement by the French foreign minister Alain Juppé even conveys the threat not to cooperate with Germany in the future: ‘The common security and defense policy of Europe? It is dead!’Footnote 97
In a meeting of the EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Alain Juppé, supported by his Danish colleague, Lene Espersen, confronted Guido Westerwelle directly with this anger stating that ‘if we had not intervened there would have probably been a bloodbath in Benghazi’. In NATO headquarters, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen openly accused the German NATO representative of violating group solidarity. In response, the German representative interrupted the NATO meeting by leaving the room.Footnote 98 But Rasmussen went on to link his anger at Germany directly to the transatlantic norm of amity: ‘Obviously some of those allies and partners carrying the heavy burden start to ask whether it would be possible to broaden the participation a bit … That is also the essence of our alliance: that allies that actually have the necessary assets at their disposal, also contribute those assets, based the principle of solidarity.’Footnote 99
As pointed out above, in an emotional (security) community, such meetings represent ritualised performances symbolising solidarity and their abrupt disruption undermines social cohesion and trust among its members. Accordingly, members of the House of Commons spoke of ‘obstruction’ and ‘cowardice’ while British Prime Minister David Cameron did not even attempt to defend Germany against such accusations.Footnote 100 In Washington, President Barack Obama wrapped his anger into a not so subtle verbal side blow against Germany: ‘Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.’Footnote 101 Setting Germany apart from the rest of the group, Obama left out Germany when he spoke of ‘our close allies’.Footnote 102 Moreover, in April 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose Berlin of all places as the venue for making clear just how angry American leaders were at Germany. In front of her predominantly German audience, Clinton evoked emotions of shame and embarrassment: ‘The world did not wait for another Srebrenica in a place called Benghazi.’Footnote 103 Subsequently, at a NATO meeting on 8 June, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates linked the American anger to the transatlantic norm of amity by demanding German solidarity as ‘a matter of fairness in an alliance built on the principle of shared burdens’.Footnote 104 In a similar way, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé criticised Germany for undermining allied solidarity when he argued that ‘NATO must play its full role, and it is not doing so sufficiently’.Footnote 105 Finally, in a joint declaration by state leaders Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron published simultaneously in the International Herald Tribune (New York), Le Figaro (Paris), and the Times (London), they hardly hid their collective anger at the German norm violation of amity by calling the German lack of solidarity in Libya ‘an unconscionable betrayal’ and that opposition to the Gaddafi regime needed to ‘begin with a genuine end to violence, marked by deeds not words’.Footnote 106 Consequently, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, and British Foreign Minister William Hague argued in similar ways.Footnote 107 Such allied finger pointing reveals high levels of collective stigmatisation and emotional rigidity against the German norm breakers by equating abstention in the UN Security Council with ‘betrayal’.
In addition to these direct expressions of anger against Germany, there were also more subtle forms of passive anger.Footnote 108 For example, at the G8 Summit in the French seaside resort of Deauville in May, the leaders of the G8 met in a seaside restaurant to discuss the Arab reform movement and other regional issues. When the Libyan military intervention came on the table, the five parties involved in the air campaign – Canada, Britain, France, Italy, and the US – continued the meeting without German Chancellor Angela Merkel.Footnote 109 It is hard to imagine that the disruption of such an important symbolic ritual at the G8 summit by physically excluding one member would not have resulted in any emotional impact on German political leaders.
Indeed, German political leaders began to publicly express solidarity toward Britain, France, and the US by complying with the emotion norm of amity. When Angela Merkel addressed fellow party members in the German Bundestag, she wished the allies success and conceded that the decision to abstain on Resolution 1973 had been made ‘with a heavy heart’.Footnote 110 In various speeches and remarks by members of the German cabinet in the following days and weeks, an emotional pattern emerged that stressed the norm of amity by expressing ‘gratitude’, ‘honor’, and ‘respect’ vis-à-vis other security community members.Footnote 111 German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle underlined that: ‘We respect and understand those partners … who … came to a different conclusion than we did. We understand those who, for honourable motives, chose to support international military intervention in Libya.’Footnote 112
Up to this point, the overall performance by Britain, France, and the US can be viewed as sanctioning the emotional non-conformity of Germany. This performance was arguably intended to provoke feelings of shame – an acknowledgement that Germany had violated the inside emotion norm of the transatlantic security community. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, for example, wrote in a contribution to a German national newspaper that he felt ‘nothing but shame for the failure of our government’.Footnote 113 Other members of the German political elite reacted in similar emotional ways. Former German Chief of Staff and former head of NATO's military planning committee, Klaus Naumann, echoed Joschka Fischer by stating: ‘I am ashamed of the position of my country.’ In the German media, Richard Herzinger, an influential journalist writing in the conservative newspaper Die Welt, criticised ‘the shameful way that Germany emerged as the party seeking to delay action’ and the liberal German weekly newspaper Die Zeit published a headline calling the Libya intervention ‘A German shame’.
Feelings of collective shame among German political elites were not, however, confined to inactive policymakers like Joschka Fischer. Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, a prominent member of the German Bundestag, shouted in a parliamentary debate on Libya: ‘I think it's a shame that the federal government, as a member of the UN Security Council, abstained in this situation.’ The head of the oppositional Social Democratic Party, Sigmar Gabriel, followed suit depicting the vote in the UNSC as ‘simply undignified’. Omid Nouripour, defence spokesperson of the Green Party in the German Bundestag, also found allied anger over the German vote in the UNSC understandable: ‘This was a disgrace!’ But even in her own party, Merkel faced the repercussions of allied anger expressed, for example, by her German parliamentary spokesperson for foreign policy, Philipp Mißfelder, the chairperson of the foreign relations committee in the European Parliament, Elmar Brok, as well as Ruprecht Polenz, head of the foreign relations committee in the German Bundestag, who all feared that Germany had lost its previous status and trustworthiness among members of the transatlantic security community as a result of the UN vote.Footnote 114 Moreover, a usually calm and collected Günther Oettinger, EU Commissioner for Energy and also a fellow party member of Angela Merkel, responded to a question on Libya at a press conference in a very emotional way: ‘In Berlin, they can say what they want, to the point of embarrassment!’Footnote 115
Feelings of shame and embarrassment are usually equated with inferior status. In an emotional (security) community, it means the loss of ‘love and respect of those whose approval matters’ and it is this type of appraisal that can lead to social conformity.Footnote 116 As pointed out above, acknowledging feelings of shame can lead to reconciliation and community-building while denial of shame leads to further isolation.Footnote 117 In the Libyan case, it can be tentatively argued that German political leaders indeed felt shame resulting from the emotional expression of anger and disappointment expressed by important community members. As a result, Germany became emotionally disconnected from the rest of the group. In order to regain its previous status within the community, Germany, at least implicitly, acknowledged feelings of shame by conforming to the inside emotion norm of amity, thus expressing feelings of gratitude, honor, and respect toward its fellow members. In addition to the feelings of collective shame cited above, Angela Merkel's statement that she was ‘saddened’ by the political discussions among NATO members following the UN Security Council vote points into this direction.Footnote 118 When it did, arguably, the door for reconciliation opened again.
This process of transatlantic reconciliation – following Germany's reaffirmation of solidarity and symbolically underscored by the decision to step up its military surveillance in Afghanistan to disburden NATO members involved in the air campaign over Libya – was embedded into a series of community-building symbolic rituals. On 14 April, the NATO ministers of foreign affairs held their meeting in Berlin (of all places) to issue a joint statement on Libya that included a reaffirmation of NATO unity and solidarity. On 7 June, Barack Obama awarded the German Chancellor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the highest civilian award in the USFootnote 119 – and granted her the first state dinner for a European head of state during his presidential term. This public expression of mutual gratitude, honor, and respect – a ‘unity reviving ceremony’Footnote 120 – was accompanied by highly emotional remarks by the US President and the German Chancellor that ushered an aura of intimacy between both political leaders. In his remarks, Barack Obama underlined the degree of emotional identification between both leaders by stating that, ‘it is our joint will that this NATO mission is successful … we have one heart of allies that beats with the other allies’.Footnote 121 Angela Merkel, on her part, stressed collective ‘pride’ of the German-American heritage, and ‘gratitude’ for the US role in World War II. On several other occasions during her remarks, she emphasised the metaphor of transatlantic ‘friendship’ and linked it to her own personal emotional experience:
Without the United States of America, I would in all probably not be able to stand here before you today. Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe.Footnote 122
The day before the award ceremony, Barack Obama gave an interview to a German newspaper (his first interview with a German print media since his inauguration) in which he talked about his personal ‘feelings’ for his ‘friend’ Angela Merkel. In tune with the German Chancellor, the US President appeared eager to stress the emotion norm of amity expressing ‘respect’, ‘gratitude’, ‘admiration’, and feelings of ‘trust’.Footnote 123
In sum, Germany's decision to abstain on UN Resolution 1973 was interpreted by Britain, France, and the US as an open display of emotional indifference and thus, a violation of the community's inside emotion norm of amity. Britain, France, and the US sanctioned the non-conformity of Germany through the expression of anger and by setting it apart from the rest of the group. This appears to have produced feelings of shame and embarrassment on the German side accompanied by a loss of power and status within NATO. In order to regain its previous status within the community German political leaders publicly expressed emotions that reaffirmed the norm of amity, which led to a process of reconciliation. It can thus be reasonably claimed that in the Libyan case the emotion norm of amity stabilised the emotional (security) community and contributed to a ritualised process of reconciliation on the inside.
Enmity
The Libyan intervention was accompanied by recurring public emotional expressions of anger, dislike, and even outright hate toward the Gaddafi regime by NATO's political leaders. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, depicted the Libyan leader as
a ruthless dictator that has no conscience and will destroy anyone or anything in his way. If Qaddafi does not go, he will just make trouble. That is just his nature. There are some creatures that are like that.Footnote 124
Barack Obama described Muammar Gaddafi as a ‘murderer’ and a ‘terrorist’ whom he found to be involved in ‘brutal repression’ and exercising a ‘grip of fear’. In a joint statement, David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy spoke of the ‘violent dictatorship’ of ‘Qadhafi's war machine’.Footnote 125 Likewise, Angela Merkel and Guido Westerwelle made it clear in various public statements that Germany regarded Gaddafi as an illegitimate leader who ‘has to go’.Footnote 126 More forcefully, Guido Westerwelle underlined ‘the brutality of the Libyan regime’ and stated that ‘I denounce and condemn the horrendous violations of human rights committed by the Libyan regime … We stand against this dictator.’Footnote 127 His fellow party member and German minister for economics, Phillip Rösler, publicly referred to ‘Gaddafi's homicide units’.Footnote 128 Echoing French, British, and American leaders, Angela Merkel called Gaddafi a ‘despot’ whose ‘disgraceful deeds … shall not remain unpunished’ and whose death made her feel ‘relieved and very happy’.Footnote 129 The German president, Christian Wulff, used even more drastic words to describe the Libyan leader: ‘This is state terrorism. This is obviously the kind of act that can be described as psychopathic.’Footnote 130 All of these emotional expressions of anger, dislike, and even hate also reappeared in the joint statement on Libya by the NATO ministers of foreign affairs in Berlin cited above. At this meeting, the NATO Secretary General spoke of a ‘desire for freedom’ and contrasted his emotional statement against ‘Gaddafi's brutal and systematic attacks’.Footnote 131
In addition to these emotional expressions of anger, dislike, and hate NATO political leaders also frequently stressed emotions like courage and bravery when speaking about NATO's military effort in Libya in general and NATO soldiers in particular. For example, on 14 April NATO ministers of foreign affairs paid ‘tribute to the skill, bravery and professionalism of our men and women in uniform carrying out this difficult task’.Footnote 132 Barack Obama equally praised the ‘brave pilots that have executed their mission with skill and extraordinary bravery’.Footnote 133 David Cameron stated that the military intervention was undertaken ‘with some fantastic allies and some very brave other countries’.Footnote 134 Bravery and courage are essentially emotional expressions of fear: if one is not afraid of someone or something one does not have to feel brave or courageous. Thus, in the Libyan case, NATO members reaffirmed the community's outside emotion norm of enmity in two ways: first, by finding a threatening Other that all members could focus their emotions on; second, by framing the military effort in terms of morally acceptable expressions of fear such as bravery or courage. In sum, by sharing these emotional expressions towards an outsider, the members of the transatlantic security community were able to maintain mutual trust and collective identity by setting themselves emotionally apart from the Gaddafi regime and thereby generating internal cohesion.
In sum, the expression of anger and fear toward an emotionally shared Other can be said to have generated internal relief and social cohesion through processes of emotional identification on the outside.Footnote 135 The collective adherence to the outside emotion norm of enmity can be said to have contributed to the stabilisation of the community during a time of internal conflict by strengthening a sense of belonging and togetherness against a common outside foe. It energised the community and provided its members with a collective sense of power: ‘Together we can make a difference. Together we can change the world.’Footnote 136 As a consequence, it can be tentatively claimed that the confirmation of the outside emotion norm of enmity contributed to the stabilisation of the transatlantic emotional (security) community that included a symbolic process of emotionally disconnecting insiders from outsiders. In the end, transatlantic conflict over the German abstention in the UNSC was at least in part mitigated through the synchronised expression of appropriate emotion norms on the inside as well as on the outside.
Conclusion
While many groups in world politics can be understood as emotional communities this article developed a conceptual framework of inside/outside emotion norms for a particular type of emotional community, namely a security community. The argument raised here was that emotion norms stabilise emotional (security) communities during inter-allied conflict. This argument was illustrated by an empirical case study of transatlantic conflict management during the Libyan intervention in 2011. This article concludes by describing some general implications as well as outlining a tentative agenda for further research.
First, it shows that political leaders use emotional language and expressions to communicate their intentions vis-à-vis insiders and outsiders. In this sense, state representatives employ a vocabulary of emotional discourse accompanied by symbolic interaction to frame regional peace and to stabilise this peace system during times of internal conflict.
Second, the study implies that violent conflict can at least in part be mitigated through the strengthening of emotional bonds. This supports the argument that the institutionalisation of emotion norms contributes to stable order in world politics. The study of international security in general and security communities in particular could thus benefit from taking emotion norms into account. Moreover, it could also be insightful to study emotion norms in other areas of world politics such as trade negotiations or climate change.
Third, the study contributes to theoretical debates in IR by outlining the importance of emotional knowledge for transforming regional security politics. Specifically, it adds an important perspective to the social construction of security communities that has previously been neglected.Footnote 137 The perception of membership in a security community, the sense of ‘we-ness’ and belonging, should also be understood as a matter of feelings, emotions, and affection. Such a perspective does not deny the fact that collective identities are forged through cognitive processes but argues that emotions are cognitive processes, that is, moral judgments made on the basis of emotional appraisals and experience. If emotion norms can change an actor's perception, emotion norms should be equally able to transform social relationships and arguably contribute to the way actors perceive and construct regional security.
In the end, this article represents a first step to systematically investigate the causal logics and mechanisms involved in the development of emotional communities in world politics. The findings in this article demonstrate that by understanding security communities as emotional (security) communities we gain a better understanding of how these communities are maintained during times of inter-member conflict. Further research needs to be conducted to develop more empirical cases of emotional communities in world politics. Specifically, researchers could show how emotion norms help non-state actors like human rights groups to maintain social cohesion. Also, scholars need to investigate under what circumstances emotion norms can be unlearnt, which could explain the failure or disintegration of previous emotional communities.Footnote 138 These examples outline a wide and promising research agenda to further investigate the emotional foundations of world politics.
