Research Papers

Our paper deals with the European Union and NATO as security actors in the contemporary European security field through the lens of Bourdieu's practice theory. This field is in flux since broad notions of security have taken centre stage together with more traditional security threats. Former domestic security issues such as illegal immigration, natural disasters, terrorism and crime - all elements of the new risk-society - are rapidly taking over the security agenda, which used to be dominated by objective (military) threats to collective security. This development, the interaction between internal and external securitization, is of major importance to the main actors in the European security field - NATO and the EU, as well as to the field itself. In this paper we will argue that both actors use securitization techniques in order to define and redefine the European security field; thus making issues part of the security field by securitizing them and subsequently imposing this new vision of social reality on other actors in the field. However, securitization's speech act and action alone are not enough to understand the dynamics. Only within certain social conditions such efforts can be successful, thus understanding requires the analysis of action, agency and structure. We will make use of Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory in order to analyse changes in the field and its boundaries - i.e. the definition of security, the rules and regulations ('doxa'), the importance of different power resources ('capital') and the power and influence of both actors. Our aim is to understand how NATO and the EU interact and how this affects the positioning of the security organizations and the properties of the field itself.