Security Dialogue
2015, Vol. 46(3) 221­–237
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DOI: 10.1177/0967010614552549
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‘Memory must be defended’:
Beyond the politics of
mnemonical security
Maria Mälksoo
University of Tartu, Estonia
Abstract
This article supplements and extends the ontological security theory in International Relations (IR) by
conceptualizing the notion of mnemonical security. It engages critically the securitization of memory as a
means of making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others.
The securitization of historical memory by means of law tends to reproduce a sense of insecurity among the
contesters of the ‘memory’ in question. To move beyond the politics of mnemonical security, two lines of
action are outlined: (i) the ‘desecuritization’ of social remembrance in order to allow for its repoliticization,
and (ii) the rethinking of the self–other relations in mnemonic conflicts. A radically democratic, agonistic
politics of memory is called for that would avoid the knee-jerk reactive treatment of identity, memory
and history as problems of security. Rather than trying to secure the unsecurable, a genuinely agonistic
mnemonic pluralism would enable different interpretations of the past to be questioned, in place of predefining
national or regional positions on legitimate remembrance in ontological security terms.
Keywords
Agonistic memory politics, Copenhagen School, desecuritization, identity, mnemonical security, ontological
security
Introduction
Just like families should have the right to complete their own photo albums, such a right should also be
reserved for states and nations. Otherwise we would be asked to undress ourselves completely, so that our
identity could be utterly destroyed. …attacks on the identity [are] targeted in the first place [at] …the most
important part of our identity – its core part. The core part is made of our inheritance. Of what we are and
what is our inherent being like. That is precisely why all states, nations and people hold dear the story of
their origins and inception…We should not deceive ourselves that our perseverance could be guaranteed
exclusively with the sword of truth. (Aaviksoo, 2011)
Corresponding author:
Maria Mälksoo, University of Tartu, Lossi 36, Tartu 51003, Estonia.
Email: maria.malksoo@ut.ee
552549SDI0010.1177/0967010614552549Security DialogueMaria Mälksoo
research-article2014
Article
222	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
Thus spoke Jaak Aaviksoo, the Estonian Minister of Defence, at a high-profile governmentorganized
conference on information warfare and psychological defence which took place in the
context of the then recently intensified action by Russia towards its former Soviet dependants, to
undermine their international image and credibility inter alia by attempting to delegitimize their
respective accounts of the Second World War (WWII). If ever a clearer declaration of the ontological
security argument was needed, as well as an exposition of its inherent ethical conundrums, here
is one. It demonstrates the spread of security outside of its traditional realm of physical survival
and it establishes the inevitable connection between state identity and security, underscoring the
role of ‘national memory’ in the biographical self-narrative of a state. Further, it exposes a quintessentially
modern political imaginary where the supremacy of sovereign states is an unquestionable
fact around the security of which all political life should circulate. An assumption is proposed
about the irrefutable interchangeability of the national mythscape and memoryscape (Bell, 2003,
2008). Invoking a ‘state’s right for informational self-determination’ (Aaviksoo, 2011), it makes
the case for the right of a nation-state as a self-conscious entity to secure its persistence as itself, if
necessary by secrets, lies, silences and disguises. It demarcates the limits of the inside of a state
from the outside world by naturalizing the policing of the borders of the self from the perils of the
other (cf. Walker, 1993), highlighting the ‘compactness’ of identity (Aaviksoo, 2009) as a vital
necessity for states and nations to survive in the age of ‘information warfare’. In short, it ontologizes
security, transforming it into an inescapable condition of international politics.
In addition to raising major ontological and epistemological questions about determining the
limits of a collective ‘self’, anthropomorphizing the state and its collective ‘memory’, we are presented
with a vision of the world where war serves as a key for understanding politics. ‘Our memory
must be defended’ emerges as a variation of the omnipresent security discourse, as yet another
ringtone of the familiar ‘society must be defended’logic (Foucault, 2003). Pursuing the security of
the biographical self-narrative of the state (Berenskoetter, 2014) (in which mnemonical narratives
occupy a central position)1 as part of the state’s security policy invites us to ponder on the ethical
implications of framing historical remembrance as a security issue. In particular, striving to fixate
on certain collective memories (cf. Steele, 2008: 55) by the juridification of the frames of legitimate
social remembrance raises a host of thorny questions about the attempted delimitation, or
even closure, of a political discussion on various violent and controversial historical events.
This article dissects the concept of mnemonical security – the idea that distinct understandings
of the past should be fixed in public remembrance and consciousness in order to buttress an
actor’s stable sense of self as the basis of its political agency – against the backdrop of a rapidly
expanding research programme on ontological security in IR (Croft, 2012; Giddens, 1991; Kay,
2012; Kinnvall, 2004; Krolikowski, 2008; Lupovici, 2012; Mitzen, 2006a, 2006b; Roe, 2008;
Rumelili, 2013; Steele, 2005, 2008; Zarakol, 2010). It inquires about the possibilities of thinking
about identity formation outside of a security framework in order to move beyond the politics of
mnemonical security. While deliberately normative in scope, the article discusses briefly a number
of examples from the actual processes of securitization in the transnational mnemopolitics of
contemporary Europe in order also to underpin suggested normative moves in social analysis.
Due to the limitations of space, these examples are offered as illustrative vignettes rather than
genuine case studies.
The core argument of this paper is that the securitization of ‘memory’ as the temporal core of a
state’s biographical narrative leads eventually to new security dilemmas and, therefore, to a reduced
sense of security among the competitive securitizers of issues of public remembrance in international
politics. The securitization of historical ‘memory’ whereby ‘our’ narrative of the past is seen
as being viciously misunderstood and misrepresented by other(s), whose vision of the past is thus
regarded as existentially endangering for our existence as ‘us’, tends to reproduce mutual
Mälksoo	 223
insecurities and reinstate historical animosities instead of alleviating them (Mälksoo, 2012).
Moreover, the ontologization of the state’s need to seek and sustain the intactness and consistency of
its identity could dangerously depoliticize the act of protecting a biographical narrative of the state.
Possible strategic calculations behind the ‘ontological’security movements could thus be easily overlooked,
and the exercise of power by mnemopolitical entrepreneurs engaged in the process disregarded.
Legislation of memory on the assumption that collective memory and, by extension,
ontological security, can be cemented by law, in fact depoliticizes it. Setting legal frames on how ‘our
story’can be remembered is, in a sense, the ultimate securitization, because it ‘ontologizes’a particular
story, making it an unchanging part of the state’s self-definition. It thus enables the power of the
ruling regime to be confirmed, encouraging state-bound remembrance practices and thus constituting
the political community in a particular way. Seeking to outlaw struggles over possible narratives thus
rejects the fundamentally political nature of state identity and, in doing so, potentially curbs certain
political and societal activity defined as undermining and endangering for this identity.
Accordingly, I posit that ‘memory’ as a referent object of security needs to be desecuritized, but
not depoliticized (in the sense of Edkins, 1999) whereby issues would remain constrained within
already accepted criteria of a specific social form (such as the constitution of a state’s self-identity
against ‘security threats’) and dealt with by a technology of expertise or the rule of bureaucracy. It
is argued that, rather, we should take notice of the political nature of collective memory as a frame
of reference which implicates and produces broadly conceived subjectivity (Edkins, 1999: 1).
While memories serve as ‘temporal orientation devices that make past meaningful by providing a
sense of where “we” have come from and what “we” have been through’ (Berenskoetter, 2014:
270), it is important to be aware of the power games in the sanctioning and institutionalization of
particular memories . The narrow, state-centric view of the ‘subject’ of politics, which dismisses
those not subscribing to, or explicitly resisting, the sovereign national narratives (bearing in mind
that ‘we’ can never be fully represented and therewith secured anyway; see Stern, 2006: 201–202),
should thus be unsettled. The deconstruction of the ontological security claims of states sheds light
on the narrative nature of states as social beings (Ringmar, 1996; Epstein, 2011), thereby making
it possible to imagine different, less fixed and more pluralistic mnemonical narratives for their
‘national’biographies. Historical remembrance as a securitized issue should be brought back to the
realm of political engagement and debate. Instead of silencing or depoliticization (which the narrow
understanding of politics as public policy, requiring government decisions and resource allocations,
essentially amounts to), repoliticization is necessary for generating emphatic understanding
and less mnemonical confrontation between nations and communities (cf. Edkins, 1999: 11).
The article proceeds thus. The first section outlines the ontological security argument as it has been
revealed in IR, with an emphasis on the mnemonical dimension of ontological security. Next, the problematic
case of the securitization of memory is conceptualized and illuminated against the backdrop of
contemporary Eastern Europe where competitive claims are being made on securing ‘national memories’
from Russia to Poland, Ukraine and beyond, ranging from mere discursive securitization to the
proposal and adoption of pertinent legislation on the meaning of WWII and the communist experience
at domestic, pan-European, and wider international levels. The third section then presents an exploration
of the possibilities of dismantling the ‘memory room’in the house of ontological security by means
of strategies of desecuritization and repoliticization. The paper concludes with a discussion of agonistic
pluralism as an alternative political imaginary to mnemonical security.
Mnemonical security as ontological security
The conventional story of security is well known; at least, so we think (Barkawi, 2011). As a concept,
security has been expanded from demarcating the need for physical survival as a prerequisite
224	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
for states to persevere to encompassing the needs of multiple social actors for ontological consistency
as an imperative for the sustainability of their identities, thereby enabling their political
agency. Ontological security theory as advanced in IR in various ways (cf. Huysmans, 1998;
Kinnvall, 2004; McSweeney, 1999; Mitzen, 2006a; Steele, 2008) argues security-as-being (as distinct
from security-as-survival) to be an ontological self-identity need, or an ontologically inherent
condition rather than a culturally circumscribed and constructed social good. Ontological security
is accordingly a basic premise for constituting a self (Rumelili, 2013). It emerges as a logical
derivative of the different constitutive conditions of a state. Hence, the distinction between security-as-survival
and security-as-being reflects the distinctive, but equally vital, features of a state
– that is, the security of its ‘body’ (e.g. territory, people, sovereign institutions) and ‘idea’ (i.e. the
biographical self-narrative of a state, including its historical memory, and the recognition of other
states to its being as such). Consequently, the realm of dangers also embraces both physical and
normative threats, whilst the endurance of the particular forms of existence of actors are valued as
equal to their physical existence itself (Creppell, 2011: 455). The notion of ‘normative threat’
draws attention to normative violation as a specific kind of transgression (besides physical violation)
which ‘elicits a sensation of harm not because there is no order (chaos) beyond one’s border,
but because of an alternative order’ (p. 471). It appears, then, that both security-as-survival and
security-as-being are driven and ordered by the ‘ethos of survival’ (Odysseos, 2002: 413) because
the survival of a physical body is not sufficient without the survival of a combination of ideational
features of a state, the intactness of which is equal to its physical endurance. Survival thus still
emerges as an overriding imperative of both modes of security (cf. Rumelili, 2013). Even though
debating the narrowly materialist and rationalist accounts of security studies as traditionally conceived,
the concept of ontological security nonetheless sustains the idea of security being the greatest
social value, the highest objective of any social action, indeed the universal good. Ontological
security reaffirms the categorical preeminence of survival as the ontological drive to protect oneself
and surpass the other, if necessary (see Odysseos, 2002: 414). Accordingly, each state also
wishes to secure its being as a certain sort of being; to guarantee its cohesiveness in order to reduce
the fundamental unpredictability of the surrounding environment and its own vulnerability vis-avis
other political actors.2
Remembering in a particular manner is instrumental in order to sustain a coherent and consistent
‘biographical narrative’ of a state:
[I]t creates the ‘person’ of the state. Without narrative, without a state agent collecting the history of a
nation-state into a story that informs current actions, the Self of a state does not exist … conceptually, the
‘idea’of the state cannot exist without this narration to develop a sense of continuity. (Steele, 2008: 20; see
also Berenskoetter, 2014)
Memory thus emerges as a vital self-identity need as it is invoked to constitute the central narrative
of a state about its past in order to form a core part of its consistent sense of the self in the
present. The intactness of a collective actor’s mnemonic vision of itself and its place in the world
thus becomes apparent as a prerequisite for an internally cohesive self. Deconstructing the central
historical backbone of the self could seriously disrupt and destabilize the respective identity and
hamper its agency as an actor in international affairs. However, it is imperative to ask whose history,
memory, identity, and security we are really talking about in each particular case; to distinguish
between the modalities of public, social, and political remembrance, because the tendency of
states to ‘homogenize’ their national identity at the expense of certain ‘strangers’ is always there
(Huysmans, 1998). The successful endorsement of a state’s story of origin does not emerge without
the exercise of power over what to remember and how the exercise of power over what to
Mälksoo	 225
remember and how. What counts for some as legitimate selections in completing one’s own ‘family
album’ reads as wilful exclusions and untruthful enforcements for others. The way we conceptualize
the collective/social/public ‘memory’of a state and the processes of ‘remembering’collectively
is of special significance in delineating the nature of the political community in question, in addition
to the nature of the ontological security of this community. Pondering on the ethical implications
of engaging the argument of historical memory in discourses and practices of security policy
is therefore an imperative.
More problematically, the social framing of issues of historical remembrance as ontological
security problems and the related lax use of military metaphors (such as ‘information warfare’ and
‘information threats’) condition and legitimate the rhetoric and the means of security for handling
them, thereby enhancing the potential of militarizing a state’s historical self-understanding and
culture as a whole. This is precarious not only with regard to the tendency of this action to produce,
inevitably, a tangled web of new security dilemmas, such as identity-based security demands possibly
conflicting with the physical security needs (Mitzen, 2006a), or situations of ontological
dissonance in which the multiple distinct identities of states are simultaneously threatened, forcing
the state to choose between them (Lupovici, 2012); the securitization of ‘national remembrance’
also tends to replay the classical security dilemma as one state’s memory of a same historical event
is not necessarily that of others, and the increase of a sense of ontological security of one state at
securing its ‘memory’often comes at the concurrent expense of its neighbours’sense of ontological
security. Another historical narrative might thus come to be perceived as a threat to the ontological
security of the self, and a so-called ‘information warfare’ necessitating ‘psychological defence’ (as
also described byAaviksoo in the introductory quotation of this present paper) might ensue (Steele,
2008: 2–3). The Baltic–Russian ‘memory wars’ concerning the interpretation of the course and
consequences of WWII (Muižnieks, 2011) and the Ukrainian–Russian–Polish controversies on the
institutionalized remembrance of historical figures, such as Stepan Bandera (Zhurzhenko, 2013),
are instructive here. The indefatigability of these mnemonic conflicts, despite vigorous attempts to
solve them once and for all by means of various mnemopolitical measures, demonstrates how seeking
ontological security via securitizing one’s ‘memory’ reduces somewhat the relative sense of
security for the participants of a particular confrontation over remembering the past because it
tends instead to amplify negative spirals of ontological insecurity. Moreover, it also seriously curbs
the self-reflexivity of the political subject, be it a nation, or a state, about its own past and its role
in the present self-understanding and self-representation in the international arena. While the disruption
of the automatized ‘memory–nation nexus’ (Olick, 2003: 5–6), or the ‘national identity
equals memory-connection’ (cf. Bell, 2009), enables a state to interrogate better its sense of self,
the securitization of historical memory by means of law gives rise instead to the risk of getting
stuck in old and counterproductive roles in international politics (see Mitzen, 2006a, 2006b; Hopf,
2010). Because ‘an honest remembrance of the past can challenge the integrity of the narrative of
state identity’ (Zarakol, 2010: 7), seeking to deduce the ontological security of a state from an
embellished mythscape instead of a fair and self-critical poking of the memories of the past remains
dangerously alluring (cf. Bell, 2008).
Hence, while mnemonical security captures crucial elements of the identity–security nexus as a
notion, it also illustrates the dangers of allowing the metaphoric arsenal of security and war to
travel untamed over all other fields of analysis of international political phenomena. To be sure, the
assumption of the possibility of ultimate security of a state identity and consequently of its ‘national
memory’is more commonly shared among the security practitioners than by much of the ontological
security literature. Rumelili (2013), Steele (2008) and Mitzen (2006a) in particular acknowledge
that seeking ontological security by rigid attachment to a monolithic identity narrative, or the
securitization of identity, is only one possibility with regard to achieving basic trust – and a dangerous
one at that. Phillip Darby (2006: 465) has nonetheless pointed out that what is missing in most
226	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
of the writings on security ‘is not only that the acceptance of some insecurity is a condition of
security itself, but that insecurity can be enabling as well as disabling’. Similarly, Maja Zehfuss
(Zehfuss, 2003) has underscored the inescapable insecurity at the heart of identity, emphasizing
how foreignness can never be entirely removed from identity and thus needs to be recognized in
order to transform the relation to the other. Considering, then, that the attempts to achieve absolute
sovereignty over a particular interpretation of the past are bound to come into conflict with competing
and contradictory narratives of the same event, would we not be better off to start from the
realization that, no matter how pervasive, mnemonical insecurities (in fact, any insecurities, for
that matter) can never be utterly overcome and eliminated?
This is not to suggest here that ontological (and by implication mnemonical) insecurity should
therefore be a preferable ‘good’ instead of the commonly sought ontological security. Rather,
because ontological anxiety is, to an extent, quite simply inevitable, it would be wiser to acknowledge
and come to terms with it instead of entertaining a pipe dream of a perfectly ‘securable’
identity and its beholder’s historical memory. The openendedness of any identity should be recognized
with regard to its perpetual state of ‘becoming’ on the boundaries of identity and difference
in its enduring dialogues with others (Mälksoo, 2010). The perils of collapsing ontological security
and the securitization of identity should thus be recognized whenever ‘historical memory’ is
summoned in discourses and practices of security policy.
The securitization of memory
I suggest that especially with regard to the tendency to reach for law as the mnemonic technology,
we are witnessing the attempted securitization of ‘historical memory’ in international politics.
Securitization, as we know from the burgeoning work of and about the Copenhagen School, is a
discursive process through which certain issues or entities are turned into a threat (Wæver, 1995;
Buzan et al., 1998; for a more sociological alternative, see Balzacq, 2011). A successful securitization
includes ‘the designation of an existential threat requiring emergency action or special measures
and the acceptance of that designation by a significant audience’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 27).
Presenting a particular way of relating to the past as instrumental for the stability and continuity of
a national biographical narrative (i.e. the state’s self-proclaimed ontological security) could mean,
in extreme emergency mode, that the state could legitimize the use of force and violence for protecting
its ‘memory’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 21).3
Endeavours to protect certain ways of relating to the past by outlawing others seek to secure
particular identities, often in order to overcome a political community’s metaphorical sense of
shame over past historical experiences and memories (cf. Steele, 2008: 115). The institutionalized
remembrance of the Holocaust in Europe serves as a prime example here, because the centrality of
this event in the political consciousness of contemporary Western society has dictated the tuning
and hierarchical organization of the overall public remembrance of WWII, totalitarian crimes and
modern mass death (Alexander, 2002). While the discursive framing of certain ways of public
remembrance as ontological security problems emerges as an attempt to ‘right past wrongs’, the
juridification of ‘memory’ enables political actors to further their alleged ontological security
needs with particular rigour and legal backing. The attempts to institutionalize politically and juridically
a particular remembrance of the totalitarian communist regimes at a pan-European level, as
pursued by Central and East European actors of various political persuasions, especially after the
eastern enlargement of the EU, provide ample support for this claim. A number of post-communist
countries in Eastern Europe have indeed called for the pan-European criminalization of the denial
of crimes perpetrated by communist regimes in the same way that a handful of the EU countries
have banned the public condoning, denial and gross trivialization of the Holocaust (Mälksoo,
Mälksoo	 227
2014). By seeking recognition for the inclusion of their experiences and assessment of communism
in the established European mnemonical narrative and normative verdict of twentieth-century
totalitarianisms, the East European actors concurrently seek recognition for their agency as
Europeans (Mälksoo, 2009a). In turn, enactment of the memory law by the Duma, the Russian
state’s legislative body, criminalizing the public remembrance of certain aspects of WWII and
aimed specifically at countering the ‘dissemination of false information on the activities of the
Soviet Union during WWII’ and the ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’ is the most recent example of this
(for discussion, see Koposov, 2014; Kurilla, 2014). The establishment of the Presidential
Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests in 2009
in order to retaliate against symbolic initiatives to establish an official equivalence between
Stalinism and Nazism is yet another symptomatic case (even though the Commission has since
been disbanded). Both of these initiatives were arguably designed as a response to the multiple
attempts to securitize ‘national’ memories of WWII and communism in other East European countries,4
thus demonstrating the tendency of mnemonical securitization to produce circular security
dilemmas. Altogether, the manifold initiatives to regulate the allowed remembrance of various
totalitarian legacies by means of law, ranging from mere declaratory statements to concrete criminalizing
measures, stipulating punishments for public condoning, denial and ‘gross trivialization’
of diverse international crimes, make competing but equally ontological claims on the security of
‘memory’, or the legitimate public remembrance of the past.
Ordering historical remembrance by means of law constitutes a legal way of closing off a particular
notion of identity. As the long-baked Russian memory law on WWII5 demonstrates, mnemonical
securitization is less about fast-tracking in the traditional sense of what amounts to
extraordinary/emergency politics and more about ‘placing limitations on otherwise inviolable
rights’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 24); that is, subjecting the freedom of speech (along with academic
freedom) as a core component of liberal democratic ‘normal politics’to restrictive judicio-political
regulation. It is precisely by seeking to put something under political control that should otherwise
be left in the realm of ordinary public deliberation, discussion and debate that memory laws qualify
as extraordinary measures. As a means of sanctioning a legitimate relationship to the past by regulating
certain remembrances as outside the accepted boundaries of political bargaining, the laws
criminalizing certain historical positions amount to institutionalized securitization, thus crystallizing
‘the response and sense of urgency’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 27). These ‘laws of fear’ are a crucial
battleground in the politics of securitization (Williams, 2011: 459). The concrete securitizing
potential of particular memory laws depends on their degree of stipulation of related punishments
versus the declaratory nature of simply condemning a particular remembrance in moral terms.6
Russia’s recently adopted law on the legitimate frames of remembering WWII is a clear case of
securitizing state-defined ‘national memory’ by outright criminalization of its contesters.7
While the discursive construction of historical memory as a security issue constitutes merely a
securitizing move, whereby attempts are made to frame a particular historical remembrance as an
issue that cannot be debated, a ‘memory law’already amounts to a specific security practice, a definite
measure that sets firmly the limits to the permitted public remembrance of a particular historical
event or legacy (cf. Salter and Mutlu, 2013: 816, fn. 4). It is precisely there that the securitization
of memory features as fundamentally anti-political, as it seeks to suppress or transcend the inherent
antagonism of the political (see Mouffe, 2005a). The attempts to forge a mnemonic consensus, at
national and transnational levels by means of pertinent memory laws, with regard to multidimensional
historical issues – such as WWII, the legacy of various communist regimes in Central and
Eastern Europe, or the many politically motivated mass killings – seek to overcome this antagonism;
but, ultimately, end up confirming its state of seeming permanence, because ‘the political in
its antagonistic dimension cannot be made to disappear by simply denying it or wishing it away’
228	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
(Mouffe, 2013: 3–4; see also Mouffe, 2005b). Seeking to protect a particular vision of the past by
condemning, delegitimizing, or overtly criminalizing the alternatives is designed to secure a self
by antagonizing others by the logic of survival. ‘Memory imperatives’, such as the allegedly cosmopolitan
memory of the Holocaust (Levy and Sznaider, 2002), especially if they are supported by
legislation, endanger an open democratic debate on the past, because they tend to replace a healthy
confrontation of democratic political positions with a fight between non-negotiable moral values
or essentialist forms of identification (Mouffe, 2013: 7). In the context of the securitization of
memory whereby particular visions of the past are presented as moral and the others as immoral,
or evil, the other thus emerges as an enemy to be destroyed rather than a legitimate adversary
‘whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be
questioned’ (Mouffe, 2013: 6–7). Attempting to forge certain mnemonic consensus as a higher
ideal of a cosmopolitan nature (such as Holocaust remembrance in the EU) is not necessarily a
more benign version of securitizing historical memory than the parochial nationalist variants (such
as Russia’s above-quoted law seeking to protect its legal predecessor’s account of WWII, thus
essentially criminalizing the critical discussion of Soviet conduct in WWII) since the consensual
ideal seeks, again, to eradicate conflict from politics – paradoxically, however, leading instead to
apathy and to a disaffection with political participation (Mouffe, 2013: 7).
For IR theory, the securitization of historical memory reaffirms the relevance of the enduring
debate about the true nature of the process: namely, should the securitization of a socio-political
issue be regarded as its hyperpoliticization or rather as depoliticization, as the issue is thus shifted
outside of the realm of the so-called normal politics and into the hands of the technocratic discretionism
of the democratically unaccountable security experts, away from the eye and participation
of the public (Edkins, 1999)? After all, securitizing ways of remembering and relating to the past
on the justification of their importance for the identity of the actor implicitly attempts to exclude
mnemonical conflicts from politics. However, this approach scarcely makes these conflicts simply
disappear because they continue to appear large at the social level.8 The securitization of ‘national
memory’ highlights the tendency to disregard and close off the intrasocietal tensions, disputes,
debates and power struggles. Supporting a national mythscape (under a banner of protecting ‘our’
memory and ‘our’ identity) makes it imperative that the possibility of an international and intrasocietal
dialogue is disregarded, eventually making the – initially somewhat metaphorically labelled
‘memory wars’ – self-fulfilling prophecies.
The relationship between securitization and politicization is fraught with complexity, however.
On the one hand, securitization is rendered in the original Copenhagen School’s account as
‘fram[ing] the issue as a special kind of politics or as above politics’; ‘as a more extreme version
of politicization’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 23). In contrast, securitization is regarded as being opposed
to politicization because the latter ‘means to make an issue appear to be open, a matter of choice,
something that is decided upon and that therefore entails responsibility, in contrast to issues that….
should not be put under political control’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 29). The tenuous distinction between
the notions of securitization and politicization reflects a tense combination of a decisionist and
exclusionary notion of security, drawing inspiration from a Schmittian understanding of the political,
and the Arendtian understanding of politics as the embodiment of the publicly debatable in the
Copenhagen School’s nodes of extraordinary/emergency and ‘normal’ politics, respectively (cf.
Aradau, 2004: 393). This tension is hardly helped by what is allegedly a missing ‘concept of politics
or clear definition of politicization’ in the Copenhagen School’s securitization theory (Aradau,
2004: 389; cf. Wæver, 2011). A harsh dichotomy between politics and security is certainly one of
the most problematic premises of the securitization framework (McDonald, 2008, 2011), not least
because this distinction may be wholly unfamiliar to those outside liberal democratic states, thus
raising questions about the assumption of an inherent, universal logic and dynamics of security
Mälksoo	 229
regardless of the physical context (Browning and McDonald, 2013). Moreover, the positioning of
‘normal politics’and security in opposition to each other remains oblivious to the extent liberalism
(as the ideological frame of ‘normal politics’) has been predicated on ‘security’ rather than the
commonly held assumption of ‘liberty’ (Neocleous, 2007).
Problematizing the dichotomous supposition of the distinguishability between ‘politics’ and
‘security’, I regard security as being inherently political because it is constituting, reproducing
and sustaining power relations. The conceptualization of politics adopted here accepts politics as
intrinsically unstable, always in the making – thus first and foremost understanding it as an
activity, establishing meaning and identity, rather than a sphere (i.e. the location of political
institutions) (cf. the first conversation on politics in the securitization literature; Pram Gad and
Lund Petersen, 2011: 318). Securitizing attempts to stop politics and contestations of multiple
mnemonic narratives are therefore fundamentally depoliticizing as well as ultimately futile.
Meanwhile, because politics could be regarded – in the Foucaultian hyperbolic reading at least
– as the continuation of war by other means (Foucault, 2003), analytically sensible distinction
between the workings and logic of politics and security remains difficult to make. I concur with
Michael C. Williams (Williams, 2011: 459) on regarding the sphere of ‘normal politics’ and the
sphere of security as a continuum rather than a sharp distinction. This present article regards the
respective emphases on debate and deliberation versus silence and speed (see Roe, 2012: 252)
as the most significant line of distinction between politicization and securitization. However,
while politicization in the Copenhagen School’s understanding should indicate paying attention
to due process through parliamentary proceedings, maintaining a space for debate and disagreement
for all parties involved, parliamentary hearings and due process are no guarantee of sustaining
‘normal politics’ because they could become instruments of securitization for the
tendency of the norm/exception binary to become blurred in legislative security politics over
time (Neal, 2012: 261). Moreover, as Matt McDonald (McDonald, 2011) has shown, in the context
of the public debate on asylum-seekers in Australia, some forms of political debate may
actually render securitization more likely, thus questioning the strong analytical distinction
between the realms of ‘security’ and ‘politics’ in the securitization framework and calling for a
further normative explanation of the desirability of various forms of deliberation and debate.
Against that backdrop the idea that securitization needs a process of desecuritization to recover
the political, as promoted by the Copenhagen School, is too tidy and linear, depicting security
strictly as a failure of ‘normal politics’, and thus failing to regard it as being among ‘most powerful
of political categories’ – as a site of perpetual contestation and possible emancipatory change
(McDonald, 2008: 579).
Contextualizing the discussion of the possibilities for dismantling the mnemonical constituent
of ontological security in the desecuritization/repoliticization debate, with the above qualifications
in mind, I contend that public historical remembrance of the past needs naturally to be discussed
politically, but preferably not juridified (which is, in and of itself, a form of depoliticization, the act
of shifting public remembrance out of the realm of an open and non-repressive political debate
between various actors, state and non-state alike). However, the discourse of mnemonical security
enables such a shift, because it normalizes the need for an existential buttressing of a state-defined
self-narrative. We should therefore be extremely cautious about the alleged ‘ontological security
needs’ of the states, because this notion can scarcely be regarded as an innocent description of the
identity–memory–security nexus. Rather, the argument pursued here takes its cue from Wæver
(1995: 56), who claims that ‘transcending a security problem by politicizing it cannot happen
through thematization in security terms, only away from such terms’. What, then, could be the
wider counter-narrative to the concept of ‘we seek to be secure in what we remember (that is,
230	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
choose to remember) about our past’? In other words, what could be an effective counter-narrative
to mnemonical security?
Desecuritization as repoliticization
It might be desirable to disintegrate the automatized connection between the state-supervised public
remembrance of the key historic events of a political community and its so-called ontological
security. I argue for the desecuritization of memory, in order to escape the tendency of mnemonical
securitization to actually depoliticize deeply political issues and public concerns. The conceptual
debate on securitization amounting to depoliticization, or rather to hyperpoliticization, is as old as
the notion of securitization itself (Hansen, 2012). I have a firm understanding of the process of
mnemonical securitization in the former meaning, because there is hardly ‘anything more political
in social life than the struggle over identity’ (Steele, 2008: 5). Therefore, contradicting the calls to
depoliticize memory (e.g. Miller, 2010), this article puts forth a call for the positively invigorated
repoliticization of issues of social remembrance on the basis of a careful definition of what is really
meant by the (benign) politics of memory. Claudia Aradau (Aradau, 2004: 388) has shrewdly
pointed out that questions about desecuritization raise fundamental ‘questions about what kinds of
politics we want’. Taking a cue from Aradau, the rest of this present paper ponders on the kinds of
memory politics that would be preferable to the securitization claims made for practices of public
remembrance.
Both securitization and desecuritization involve the configurations (and possibly reconfigurations)
of self–other relations. However, it is important to note that even though ontological security
presupposes an other (since its intimate connection with identity requires differentiation), it does
not necessarily lead to the securitization of an other in the sense of defining it as a threat (Rumelili,
2013) – just as being critical of the Soviet conduct in WWII need not, by definition, signify the
attempted ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’, as the zero-sum mnemonic vision crystallized in the recently
adopted Russian memory law on WWII seemingly assumes. Accordingly, self–other relations
could be reconfigured so that the perceptions of threat would be removed without discarding the
distinctions necessary for ‘security-as-being’. Nonetheless, even in the case of desecuritization, the
emerging self–other relations would still be infused with power, and the possibility of constructing
the other as inferior, or distant, cannot be entirely ruled out (Rumelili, 2013). The ‘ethos of survival’
permeating security, be it physical or ontological, still tends to impose ‘a particular kind of
a relational mode, whose focus is the protection of the self and the surviving of the other’(Odysseos,
2002: 414). The ethical imperative of self-preservation thus still remains the essence of security.
The politics beyond mnemonical security therefore necessitates a move beyond a secure self, to
unravel the subject of security through the sense of the other (Calkivik, 2010: 138). In order to
begin imagining the politics of memory beyond the politics of mnemonical security, the radical
interdependency of the self and an other should be recognized first. In IR this suggestion has been
promoted by scholars working in the vein of Heidegger, Levinas and Nancy, generally underscoring
the relational co-existence and ‘critical belonging’ in contradiction of the assumption of the
possibility of absolute subjectivity, or organic community (e.g. Coward, 2005; Odysseos, 2007;
Dillon, 1996). Besides re-configuring self-other relations by thoughtfulness about and responsibility
for the effects of our actions on the needs of others (cf. Steele, 2008: 164), it might at times be
necessary to break free from the habitual routines of self-definition, to be open to reconceptualize
oneself in the interests of a healthier ontological and physical self–other relationship, to be more
willing to embrace self-reflexivity, to learn and, possibly, change.
Taking our cue from Brent Steele’s (Steele, 2008) biographical, narrative-centric approach to
ontological security, there is always room for self-reflexive learning and some constructive change
in the self-narratives we produce about ourselves. Accordingly, moving beyond the politics of
Mälksoo	 231
mnemonical security as a sub-layer of ontological security would entail the ability of political actors
to learn to tell new stories about themselves, to break away from the old and possibly harmful routines
for both themselves and their ‘others’; in a nutshell, the ability to renew oneself, not just survive
as a certain sort of being. Advancing self-interrogative reflexive processes as part of the healthy politics
of memory thus becomes crucial for moving beyond the politics of mnemonical security (cf.
Steele, 2008: 149). Instead of the public sanctification and securitization of the remembrance of the
‘Great Patriotic War’ as the core of modern Russia’s self-narrative and thus a major source of its
ontological security as a powerful and heroic state, the country’s historical self-reflection would benefit
from the ‘memory work’ of the likes of Memorial – a social movement, dating back to the times
of perestroika, with the objective of preserving the social memory of Soviet political repressions, and
a human rights organization focusing on the perspective of individual sufferings and injustices done
by, rather than the glory of, the state. Conjoining historians and legal advocates, Memorial’s mnemopolitics
comprises the study and commemoration of, and education about, the political persecution
and violation of human rights on the territory of the former Soviet Union, both in historical and contemporary
perspectives. As a counterpoint to Russia’s state-sanctioned selective remembrance of
WWII and the overall Soviet experiment (of which the registration of Human Rights Center
‘Memorial’ in Moscow as a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice, and the threats of its closure,
speak volumes), the focal point of Memorial’s legal mnemopolitics has been the amendment of the
Law on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression (1991) and legal assistance to the victims of
Soviet repressions. Its self-appointed mission remains ‘… to promote mature civil society and democracy
based on the rule of law… to prevent a return to totalitarianism’.9
Of course, questioning oneself is often viewed as a sign of weakness by both internal critics and
external adversaries – which is perhaps the reason why self-interrogation tends to be suspended
more often than not in the mnemonical practices of states. It is indeed the ‘irony of self-interrogative
reflexivity… that it may disturb before it heals’ (Steele, 2008: 151). It is hardly surprising,
then, that a common trait in the politics of memory of post-war Western and post-communist
Eastern European countries alike has been the tendency to recall the immediate collective tragedies
first through the prism of national martyrdom or victimhood, before turning a more critical eye to
the issues of co-responsibility, collaboration and possibly also guilt. Russia’s recently adopted
memory law which attempts to curb any discussion of the early wartime Soviet–Nazi alliance and
reject the notion of ‘Soviet war crimes’ is a symptomatic example of this pattern.
Openness to question the rigid vision of one’s past and willingness to adopt heterogeneous stories
instead of the grand mnemonical narrative of the whole nation or state might surely not only
dismantle the well-established and emotionally satisfying routines of the actors concerned, but also
eventually result in bringing them closer to the desired sense of ontological peace (or the state of
mnemonical asecurity) where issues of remembrance are simply no longer considered in terms of
security. Change in the habitual patterns of the politics of mnemonical security cannot therefore
happen without reflection on one’s habits (cf. Hopf, 2010: 555).
The process of self-reflection and possible transformation is linked to the process of transforming
images of the other, whereby the latter comes to perceive the key aspects of their identity to be
recognized (Strömbom, 2014). The recognition of the other’s difference implies a mutually
accepted agreement to disagree on the ‘national’ interpretations of historical events and issues
rather than an achievement of a single joint narrative on the past (see Raag, 2013, for a recent
example in that direction).
Conclusion: Towards agonistic mnemopolitics
Thus far I have tried to accomplish two tasks in this paper. First, the concept of mnemonical security
as a subset of a rapidly expanding research programme on ontological security was developed.
232	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
Next, this notion was dissected for its tendency to overwhelm the purpose of achieving a sense of
consummation for a collective self in international relations as well as its problematic ethical ramifications.
Since attempts at competitive consolidation of social memory tend to reproduce rather
than eliminate the sense of insecurity among the contesters, I outlined two actions necessary to
move out of the politics of security (cf. Dillon, 1996): (i) the desecuritization of memory in order
to allow for its repoliticization; and (ii) the rethinking of the self/other relationship.
In this final section, an alternative political imaginary to that of mnemonical securitization is
sketched by setting out an argument for the politics of agonistic mnemonic pluralism instead of the
futile search for a mnemonical consensus. In lieu of the exponential growth in securitization of the
conflicting views of the past and the attempts to solve this tension by outlawing certain ways of
remembrance at national and regional levels, a radically democratic, agonistic memory politics
would be in order, because this would halt the knee-jerk reactive treatment of issues of identity,
memory and history as problems of security. The selective censorship of social remembrance precludes
the actors from justifying and rationalizing their actions (cf. Owens, 2007: 5), thus denying
the process of ontological security seeking its true political content.Agonistic pluralism in the politics
of memory presumes the vitality of the struggle over interpretations of the commonly experienced
past in order to advance a better understanding of the self and clarify the mnemonical
component of a self–other nexus. With regard to agonistic politics in general, the version of memory
politics advocated here presumes the impossibility at any time of excluding conflict, disagreement
and discord from political action (cf. Arendt, as cited in Owens, 2007: 25–26). Assuming that
certain differences and the contestability of social remembrance remain irreducible, the public
relationship to the past has to remain in the realm of the speakable, debatable and discussable – that
is, it should be allowed to exist in the sphere of the political, or the realm of speech, as Hannah
Arendt put it (cited in Owens, 2007: 5). In the long run this would amount to a step towards a political
order in which the moves seeking to securitize ‘memory’ are less likely to succeed (see Tjalve,
2011: 442).
Instead of seeking the mnemonic consensus as an expression of the idealized mnemonic security,
agonistic memory pluralism emphasizes the opportunity to identify with clearly defined opinions
and positions in the public sphere, on the assumption that the political model oriented towards
consolidating a consensual common vision offers neither choice nor meaningful alternatives
(Mouffe, 2013). While Mouffe’s concern is with democratic politics at the domestic level, her
model’s core warning ‘… of the illusion that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated’
(Mouffe, 1999: 757) is evocative in the context of mnemonical security-seeking, enabling the
extension of the argument for agonistic pluralism to discuss also the interaction of states with each
other. It thus necessitates a move beyond the politics of mnemonic security and towards agonistic
pluralism in collective remembrance, that is, towards the politics of memory between plural equals.
However, such a mnemopolitical engagement is based on the presumption of the readiness of the
contenders to concede to the idea of the mutual dependence and ultimate openendedness of their
identities. The expeditious adoption of the model of agonistic mnemopolitics remains rather farfetched
in Eastern Europe against the backdrop of the considerable power imbalances between
Russia and its former Soviet dependants and the former’s state-endorsed mnemopolitics determining
the identity of the state (and its ability for agency thereof) in zero-sum terms.
The suggestion to stand clear of regulating public remembrance of historical events by means
of law, avoiding outright criminalizing bans on historical interpretations in particular, might easily
be read as a call for a First Amendment for Europe, something akin to the eponymous stipulation
of the US Bill of Rights which protects free speech broadly. However, a failure to acknowledge the
accompanying legal debate over regulating so-called hate speech would be equally ignorant. As
Browning and McDonald (2013: 250) have perceptively pointed out:
Mälksoo	 233
The normative preference for deliberation evident in the commitment to desecuritization … is not
sufficiently robust to enable us to engage with difficult questions concerning the forms of deliberation that
should be encouraged or even the circumstances in which ‘hate speech’… might be curtailed.
Evidently, guaranteeing free speech together with regulating to prevent the harms of hate speech
present competing policy demands (Gelber, 2010). It is not surprising, then, that hate speech and
historical revisionism/negation have often become convoluted in European legislations and legal
practice. While this discussion is out of the scope of this article, it remains the case that in a situation
where several European jurisdictions as well as case law by the European Court of Human
Rights have established the criminalization of Holocaust denial or defence as an important exception
to the freedom to debate the past, or the justifiable restrictions on free speech (Brems, 2011:
288), competitive quests to apply the same delimiting standards to remembering other cases of
genocide or crimes against humanity (e.g. the crimes of the totalitarian communist regimes), or
simply to cases of ‘ontological security significance’(such as the remembrance of WWII as defined
by the current Russian regime), are bound to occur, with potentially detrimental consequences for
both transitional justice in the countries under question and academic freedom and freedom of
speech in general.
The argument presented here has called for more politics of memory instead of the widespread
attempts to fix the public relationship to the past by juridified rules as a tactic to support competitive
‘selves’. In the Arendtian spirit, the importance of a genuine debate between plural equals (see
Owens, 2007: 25–26; cf. Arendt, 1958) should be recognized, and the right for the open struggle
over memory instead of vain attempts to secure one’s own ‘national memory’ at the expense of the
other(s)’ only encouraged. Reconceptualizing a self–other relationship from that of enemies to
ideological and mnemonical opponents, or adversaries, creates a symbolic space necessary for
arguing over the diverging interpretations and positions on the commonly experienced, yet contested,
past. Such a move advances both self-reflexivity and that between a self and an other. If the
other in the debates on collective remembrance becomes conceptualized as someone whose vision
of the past we might not agree with but whose right to defend that vision we do not question as
such, a more benevolent perspective for settling these mnemonic debates is created than in a situation
where the securing of a memory is regarded as necessitating the destruction of another (cf.
Mouffe, 1999).
Agonistic mnemonic pluralism, informed by critical historical research, should alleviate understanding
about – although not necessarily the mutual acceptance of – different readings of the
commonly experienced past. From the ontological security perspective, reflexivity about oneself is
a surer step in the direction of achieving a sense of self-consummation and accomplishment than
uncritical attempts at consolidating a single authoritative vision of the past for a political collective.
Abandoning the hope of achieving security of memory would eventually create a space more
conducive to amicable mnemopolitical solutions in international affairs.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the organizers and participants of the Dismantling Security conference of 2012 at the
University of Cambridge, and to Philippe Bourbeau and the three anonymous reviewers for useful comments
on an earlier draft of this paper. Special thanks are also due to Tarak Barkawi and Bud Duvall.
Funding
This research was funded by the European Union through the European Social Fund’s Mobilitas post-doctoral
fellowship (GSHRG060MJ) and HERA Memory at War project (MSHRG10039).
234	 Security Dialogue 46(3)
Notes
1.	 Cf. the concepts of ontological narratives (which are used to define who we are, which, in turn, can be a
precondition on knowing what to do) and public narratives (Somers, 1994: 618–619).
2.	 Cf. the Copenhagen School’s notion of ‘societal security’, defined as ‘the ability of a society to persist
in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats … the sustainability,
within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and
religious and national identity and custom’ (Wæver, 1993: 23).
3.	 As Dmitri Rogozhin, a member of the Russian State Duma, suggested in April 2007, when Russian
and Estonian remembrances about whether the Soviet annexation of the country in 1945 qualified as
‘occupation’ or ‘liberation’ from the Nazis clashed around the relocation of a Soviet war monument (the
so-called ‘Bronze Soldier‘) in Tallinn, such a move could have constituted a casus belli against Estonia
(Delfi, 2007).
4.	 The Ukrainian parliament, for example, adopted a memory law in 2006, originally proposed by President
Viktor Yuschenko, criminalizing the denial of the Great Famine or Holodomor (i.e. extermination by
starvation) of 1932–1933 and its genocidal nature. Ukraine further attempted (though eventually to no
avail) to secure the adoption of a special resolution at the United Nations that would have declared
Holodomor an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Likewise, Russia has sponsored resolutions
in the UN opposing the alleged resurgence of Nazism since 2003. Several Central and Eastern European
countries, including the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania, have specific clauses in their
national legislations regulating the legitimate remembrance of totalitarian communist regimes and the
denial of their crimes.
5.	 Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that while multiple draft bills have been discussed by the State Duma since
2009, the adoption of the final version of the law was notoriously fast in April 2014, against the backdrop
of Russia’s intensifying military confrontation of Ukraine.
6.	 Such as a number of recent political declarations by the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the EU, condemning totalitarian communist regimes in various
ways (Mälksoo, 2014).
7.	 The perpetrators of the crime of ‘rehabilitating Nazism’ face a penalty up to 300,000 rubles, forced hard
labour or imprisonment for a period of up to three years. Further penalties are foreseen in the event of
an abuse of public office or mass media. Fines are also introduced for desecrating Russian military glory
dates or monuments.
8.	 As was vividly demonstrated in the context of the so-called Bronze Soldier crisis in Estonia inApril 2007
when the legal backing for the relocation of a Soviet-era WWII monument from Tallinn city centre to a
military cemetery could not curb violent upheavals of the Russian-speaking youth, fiercely disapproving
of the move (Mälksoo, 2009b).
9.	 See http://www.memo.ru/eng/about/charter.htm (accessed: 29 July 2014).
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Maria Mälksoo is Senior Researcher in International Relations at the University of Tartu. She is the author of
The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries
(London: Routledge, 2010). She has published on East European memory and security politics and IR theory
in International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies, European Journal of International
Relations, Security Dialogue, and Communist and Post-Communist Studies.