Toward Cooperative Security? International Integration and the Construction of Security in Estonia

In: Millennium: journal of international studies, Band 31, Heft 2, S. 297-317

Abstract

This article investigates how the notion of security is used in Estonia both to legitimise and delegitimise international integration. It outlines the assumptions, claims and modes of analysis that underpin security narratives, specifying what are constructed as threats to Estonia and what are framed as appropriate countermeasures to these threats. The article scrutinises in particular whether this discourse is undergoing a transformation from exclusive confrontational to inclusive cooperative conceptualisations. I argue that a shift has occurred from military definitions of security to those articulated in terms of culture and values, but that this cultural definition works not against but in tandem with the binary oppositions of inside/outside and us/them. The transition has been not from exclusive to inclusive operationalisations of security but from exclusions based on the notion of military threat to those invoking culture and values. This diffuse cultural discourse enables the selective deployment of divergent arguments to different audiences while maintaining the familiar underlying dichotomies.