The European Union (EU) faces many crises and risks to its security and existence. While few of them threaten the lives of EU citizens, they all create a sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future for many ordinary Europeans.
It is now more than a decade since the concept of “ontological security” was introduced into International Relations (IR) in order to better understand the “security of being” found in feelings of fear, anxiety, crisis, and threat to wellbeing. However, a real question must be raised over why the study of ontological security has not been used collectively to understand the most profound challenges to security within the EU.
The authors in this special issue makes use of this literature to explore how narratives of European integration have been part of public discourse in the post-war period and how reconciliation dynamics, national biographical narratives and memory politics have been enacted to create ontological security. It has also been used to understand the anxiety of the “remainers” in the Brexit referendum and the consequences of its failure to address the ontological anxieties and insecurities of remain voters.
As a body of literature, it has further been drawn upon to analyse how European security firms market ontological security through various mechanisms and has resulted in an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU and NATO’s engagement with hybrid threats and with EU as an anxious community.
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