Introduction
This paper contends that paying attention to dynamics of mass consumerism helps us understand how individual and collective actors create ontological (in)security. Mass consumerism is referred to as a ‘mass-production and mass-marketing system that imagines an ever-widening abundance of goods within a culture that emphasizes buying and selling, desire, glamour, and flexible, purchase-driven identities’.Footnote 1 Mass consumerism, which Goedde has described as ‘globalization’s most visible feature’,Footnote 2 has been explored by a great body of scholarship across the social sciences and humanities.Footnote 3 In international relations (IR) and ontological security studies (OSS), however, work on consumerism and consumption has remained limited.Footnote 4
The central contention of this paper is that mass consumerism forms a global recognition hierarchy that shapes whether citizens perceive their society (and the state) to be social systems that are cooperative and enduring. Consequently, it is this broader perception that shapes whether actors develop system trust, ‘the feeling of knowing that the set of basic institutions that shape everyday life, including the political, social, and moral systems, are as they are and will continue in their present form’,Footnote 5 or whether they become ontologically insecure, creating the widespread discontent, grievances, and a sense that the social system inhabited by actors is illegitimate. The paper therefore demonstrates that the presence and absence of trust are foundational for many other processes taking place in OSS.
The paper therefore argues that intersocietal comparisons, manifesting themselves in citizens’ everyday expectations about living standards and the perceived adequacy of provided mass consumer goods, significantly shapes their ontological (in)security. It explores this dynamic by bringing works on struggles of recognition into conversation with scholarship on trust in the context of generating ontological (in)security.Footnote 6 Scholarship on recognition demonstrates that actors’ self-understandings need to be affirmed and validated by others;Footnote 7 it demonstrates that citizens and states seek affirmation of their social distinctiveness and identity, and hence of their social standing and desirability, in a global hierarchy that defines what it means to lead an affluent, aspirational, and hence ‘modern’ lifestyle in the first place from transnationally floating ideas and imaginaries of the good life. Those that perceive their society to provide them with a comparatively more ‘modern’ and ‘superior’ lifestyle are more likely to develop system trust.
The paper illustrates these dynamics empirically by showing the early Cold War relationship between West Germany (FRG) and East Germany (GDR).Footnote 8 Both states competed with one another to demonstrate intra-German leadership, but also that their espoused social system was superior, by seeking to provide their citizens with higher living standards. West German citizens developed system trust because the West German state successfully reframed their understanding of what it meant to be German around pride in a socio-economic system that provided high living standards for all (the social market economy). This promise was matched by the increasingly widespread provision of affluence, a process that has been termed the ‘economic miracle’. The East German regime, on the other hand, promised its citizens that they would eventually catch up with the FRG.Footnote 9 Yet its attempt to do so was shaped by the regime’s desire to redefine the meaning of consumerism away from individualistic towards collective affluence – East German citizens rejected this and became increasingly discontent with the regime as it failed to live up to its promises, creating distrust and ontological insecurity.
The remainder of the paper will proceed as follows: the first section establishes why mass consumerism and dynamics of consumption are important areas for OSS. The following section argues that mass consumerism should be understood as a recognition hierarchy. The third section introduces concepts of trust and their importance for OSS, developing the central conceptual argument of the paper. The fourth section applies the concept to the example of the two German post-war states. The fifth section concludes.
Ontological security and consumption
OSS scholarship has primarily explored how actors experience and cope with ontological insecurity,Footnote 10 an emotional disposition that occurs when the autobiographical narratives or routines that sustain actors’ identities are no longer compatible with the reality they inhabit.Footnote 11 As a result, however, OSS research has become preoccupied with explaining the maladaptive responses that many actors resort to in such dynamics.Footnote 12
How does consumption fit into the creation of ontological security and insecurity? Consumption and dynamics related to it (what one may term mass consumerism, a phenomenon to which I will return later) are highly compatible with OSS scholarship. Consumption, broadly defined, is the ‘acquisition and appropriation of goods and services’.Footnote 13 Yet to help elucidate why actors consume and how they do so, it is necessary to break down consumption into two categories. I term them Maslowian and Veblenian consumption. Maslowian consumption is named after psychologist Abraham Maslow. In his 1943 paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Maslow developed a hierarchy of needs that drive human behaviour.Footnote 14 Of interest here are the basic needs outlined in Maslow’s hierarchy, including food, shelter, water, and clothing, whose satisfaction humans prioritise.Footnote 15 What first comes to mind today, however, is how affluent individuals who are not exposed to urgent physiological needs engage in the consumption of less existentially needed consumer goods. This is captured by Veblenian consumption, named after economist Thorstein Veblen, who argued that consumption is not (just) an inner-directed process of satisfying material needs but also undertaken to signal social standing.Footnote 16 This process, which he termed ‘conspicuous consumption’,Footnote 17 highlights how consumption has become associated today – stratification, hierarchies, and the (re-)production of identities. Veblenian consumption therefore suggests that actors’ material desires are shaped by those goods and services that indicate actors possess high status in social hierarchies.Footnote 18 This paper is primarily concerned with Veblenian consumption and its relationship to ontological (in)security.
An important implication of this typology is that it not only captures the enormous conceptual scope of consumptionFootnote 19 but also demonstrates consumption’s social and political implications. Veblenian consumption helps us think about how actors conceive of themselves in relation to those goods and about their own sense of self in the world. While there are no OSS accounts that explicitly cover such dynamics of consumption, IR scholarship related to status and hierarchies has begun depicting how states consume and why. Gilady, for instance, has explicitly used Veblenian consumption to show how states signal wealth and status to others.Footnote 20 Similarly, Nexon and Musgrave argue states engage in highly visible status projects to shore up hegemonic legitimacy.Footnote 21 More recently, Strange has argued that states invest in ‘prestige projects’ such as football stadiums, despite more pressing (Maslowian) needs, to satisfy particular status-driven desires.Footnote 22
These accounts all demonstrate that states attach their standing to hierarchies that are shaped by the social interpretation of material goods and practices. Yet states are not persons,Footnote 23 and it can be assumed that consumption dynamics affect individuals differently. How individuals interact with and perceive the material world is shaped by the transnational dimension of consumption dynamics in an increasingly globalised economy, a phenomenon I will address in the subsequent section. Consumption exposes actors to the international, and its hierarchies, in particularly vulnerable ways.
This remark suggests that OSS has much to gain from meaningfully applying consumption concepts to dynamics of ontological security, especially for understanding everyday dynamics evolving around experiencing ontological (in)security. The ‘everyday’ is a research area that OSS scholarship, and IR more generally,Footnote 24 has only recently begun exploring in greater detail, problematising how individuals (rather than states) experience international politics.Footnote 25 Since there are no OSS accounts that explicitly cover such dynamics in the context of consumption, a first step to develop them is to turn to sociological concepts of consumption for illustration. Sociologists have shown that consumption is a useful concept to understand dynamics of inequality, exclusion and inclusion, self- and social identity, and distinction and taste.Footnote 26 The ‘cultural turn’ in the sociology of consumption is especially insightful, as it conceptualises consumption as ‘a realm for individual agency and choice’.Footnote 27 These accounts depict how individuals relate to goods and services and how they affect their identities, highlighting the emotional and relational component of consumption. These scholars see goods and services as an ‘extended self’ – actors ‘define and remind’ one another of who they are through their consumptive behaviour.Footnote 28 Works focusing on the structural and habitual components of consumption complement this further – in these accounts, consumption practices sustain actors’ understanding of their place in the world,Footnote 29 an important indication of not only its direct relationship to dynamics of ontological security (OS) but also the wider structural processes inevitably related to consumption that will be covered throughout this paper.
This brief overview allows for sketching out five potential ways in which consumption intersects with OSS. Illustrating these connections is especially important because consumption’s relative absence from OSS means it remains unclear how these processes interact with one another, and, indeed, how they affect dynamics covered in OSS.
(1) Routines: Routines are central for the maintenance of OS because they ‘create cognitive and behavioural certainty’.Footnote 30 Consumption behaviour can contribute to such routines, for example through everyday shopping behaviour. Likewise, the interruption of such routines may generate the potential for ontological insecurity because their absence would increase an actor’s awareness of life’s ‘chaos’ and ‘competing threats’.Footnote 31
(2) Lifestyles: Giddens argues that individuals in modern societies construct individualised lifestyles that ‘give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity’, manifesting itself in ‘habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieu’.Footnote 32 In other words, consumption practices can provide an actor with the sense that they are actively constructing their chosen self.Footnote 33
(3) Creativity: A range of OS scholars have shown that processes of rhetorical and aesthetic creation can have uplifting and emancipatory effects.Footnote 34 Such acts show, for instance, that one way in which the nation’s meaning, and an individual’s relationship to it, is performed is through such cultural acts. Consumption is directly entangled with creativity – the process of building one’s ‘extended self’Footnote 35 and constructing one’s lifestyles ultimately also has to be understood as an ongoing creative process in which actors reflect on how they want to present themselves to the world and what kind of social roles they want to perform.
(4) Fantasies: A recent development in OS has been the emergence of Lacanian and psychoanalytical accounts, which argue that ontological insecurity is not fleeting but constant. In such accounts, actors seek to ameliorate constant anxiety by indulging in and pursuing fantasies of fulfilment.Footnote 36 In such views, (over)consumption would represent a form of constantly changing wish-fulfilment that never truly satisfies actors, keeping them attached to a cycle of insecurity. In addition, this also highlights that processes of (over)consumption can make actors materially insecure in the long run by sustaining the capitalist practices that undermine the planet’s environment.Footnote 37
(5) Trust: Trust is ‘an actor’s confidence that their environment is stable and will be reproduced’.Footnote 38 It also affects an actor’s positive disposition towards and confidence in a social system overall.Footnote 39 Consumption affects the presence or absence of trust by giving rise to and sustaining ongoing routines; the continued interruption of such routines, or the imposition of an environment that actors do not consider worth reproducing, will generate ontological insecurity and distrust. How actors ascertain which environment they inhabit is crucial for this. This dynamic is central to the conceptual argument in this paper and will be addressed later on.
While this overview demonstrates the intersection between consumption and OSS scholarship, it poses of the question how we can ascertain when, why, and how consumption may generate these effects. Put simply: which processes take priority? I begin addressing this in the next section. There, I argue that consumption must not be understood as separate acts carried out by atomised individuals; it has socio-political implications that shape actors’ entire perception of the world they inhabit, and hence also their ontological security. I discuss this by introducing the concept of mass consumerism and how it is embedded in recognition hierarchies.
Mass consumerism, the modern economy, and struggles for recognition
Understanding the relationship between ontological (in)security and consumption requires a broader understanding of the socio-economic processes within which consumption is embedded. I do so in this section by highlighting consumption’s role as a system of mass consumerism, which has become increasingly central to geopolitical recognition hierarchies during the past century. Mass consumerism is part of a hierarchy that sorts states into relations of super- and subordination based on economic performances and intersocietal economic comparisons, a dynamic that has become increasingly prevalent since the early to mid-twentieth century.Footnote 40
The rise of economic statistics, economic managerialism, and mass consumerism
Mass consumerism’s importance for understanding the creation of ontological (in)security needs to be understood in the context of the rising importance of economic knowledge and managerialism over the past century. From the 1930s onwards, the emergence of modern tools of bureaucracy and economic managerialism gradually propelled economic comparisons between states to the centre of domestic and international politics. The origins of ‘modern’ economic statistics emerged in colonial administrations during the late nineteenth century;Footnote 41 such processes of managerialism then eventually gave rise to the notion of ‘the economy’ in the 1930s and 1940s. The emergence of such advanced statistics made it possible to understand a state’s economy as ‘self-contained, internally dynamic and statistically measurable sphere of social action’.Footnote 42 The notion that ‘the economy’ was malleable, and indeed could be grown, falls into the same period.Footnote 43 This process has become especially pronounced since the post-war era. In the mid-twentieth century, new statistical tools allowed economists for the first time to capture a society’s economic output in a single number, the gross national product (GNP).Footnote 44 This directly led to the emergence of the economic growth paradigm. Schmelzer has described this as the ‘specific ensemble of societal, political, and academic discourses, theories, and statistical standards that jointly assert and justify the view that GDP growth is desirable, imperative, and essentially limitless’.Footnote 45
The onsetting Cold War generated a further impetus to apply such metrics; the two blocs sought to outcompete each other economically, embedding the notion that high GDP was akin to civilisational superiority.Footnote 46 These dynamics allowed citizens to measure how well they were doing in life vis-à-vis their neighbours, and how well their country was doing internationally, a perception that was continuously reinforced through narratives that highlighted consumer affluence. These state objectives to generate growth manifested themselves in citizens’ everyday lives through the gradual emergence of an expectation that states would provide them with a gradually increasing standard of living. Referred to by De Grazia as ‘the minimum that humans require to live in dignity’, a high standard of living became associated with an American ‘way of life’ while also functioning as a tool of cultural Cold War diplomacy.Footnote 47 Unlike previous European markers of status, the standard of living was exclusively attached to income. It therefore turned class, culture, taste, and even civilisational belonging into acquirable commodities; it gave status to whoever had most to buy and most to sell.Footnote 48 In other words, the standard of living was the number-cum-imagery of an idealised sovereign consumer who freely participates in the economy by spending their significant disposable income on goods that make their lives easier and who engages in leisure.Footnote 49 With American consumer capitalism spreading into Europe, pre-existing social hierarchies that had tied social respectability and taste to social class came under challenge.Footnote 50 While those earning more remained most influential for defining the substantive nature of social hierarchies, the good life was now (in theory) open to anyone (if they could afford it).Footnote 51
In sum, these dynamics have given rise to an expectation that the provision of permanent growth and affluence are the central purpose of state policy. Those states who succeeded at providing growth and citizens with affluence, captured through GNP, came to be regarded as well-performing states that looked after their citizens. Unlike previous social hierarchies, the hierarchy of affluence was easily discernible and intelligible for everyone – it seemingly scientifically captured societal progress in a single number and permitted instant intersocietal comparisons.
Mass consumerism as struggle for recognition
Theories of recognition are a promising way of elucidating how actors respond to and interact with such hierarchies, and how this affects the creation of ontological (in)security. Theories of recognition are based on the premise that ‘humans need to be known, understood, and affirmed’.Footnote 52 To feel fulfilled, actors need their envisioned and preferred understanding of themselves (i.e., their identity) recognised by others. Gaining this recognition from others that actors consider important is therefore imperative. To do so, actors engage in struggles for recognition,Footnote 53 a process in which others either grant them their envisioned sense of self, and hence adequate status and affirmation, or deny these aspirations, an outcome referred to as misrecognition.Footnote 54 Greve argues that this process takes place in four steps: the emergence of the actor’s aspired self-definition, the perception of that definition by others, the recognition or misrecognition of that envisioned status or identity, and, finally, the actor’s response to this process.Footnote 55 Most of the theory, similar to OSS, is concerned with the negative processes of recognition: when actors have their aspired identities misrecognised.Footnote 56 Consequently, the recognition theory’s importance for OS is that being (mis)recognised affects whether actors perceive their identities to be under threat and how they then go on to create ontological security. Recognition theory therefore helps with understanding which self-conceptions actors develop and why, and, in turn, how they interpret social hierarchies.
Consequently, since at least the post-war era, if not earlier, the struggle for recognition has taken place within a hierarchy that gradually reproduced a Western (and primarily American) depiction of the standard of living as the pinnacle of a ‘modern’, fulfilling, and affluent life. This means in more conceptual terms that citizens came to define their status based on where they perceive their society to be located within this recognition hierarchy, and whether the expectations they derive from that position are met or not. While it would be misleading to assume that these expectations exclusively evolve around comparisons between societies (rather than within), I will limit my remarks here to the effects of the former. The reason for this is the state’s centrality for managing and satisfying the recognition desires of its citizens. Since the nineteenth century, states have increasingly become the ontological security providers of their citizens; citizens derive both their understanding of the world and also their hierarchical position in it through identification with the state.Footnote 57 The modern state therefore performs sovereignty over and for its citizens.Footnote 58 Applied to mass consumerism, this means that citizens compare their society to other states considered peers and whether they receive a reasonable standard of living compared to them.
Despite its centrality, states struggle at performing this role. One reason is the nature of recognition hierarchies – by growing increasingly global in its comparative scope, mass consumerism transcends borders. While states can redefine how consumerism is articulated in the political language of their societies, a process comparable to norm localisation,Footnote 59 they struggle to redefine its substantive meaning. Transnational communication flows mean that the desire for the underlying substantive dimensions of the hierarchy is very difficult to eradicate entirely because imagery of the good life continues to spread. The most extreme reaction to misrecognition, exit,Footnote 60 is therefore even more difficult. How can states not prioritise elevating their citizens’ living standard if everyone is doing it? For all these reasons, citizens would heavily punish those advocating to set aside the drive for affluence entirely, either electorally or with enduring discontent. Perhaps ironically, then, even non-capitalist societies, such as those of the Soviet bloc, have heavily relied on the promise of elevated living standards.Footnote 61
This points towards the central importance of elites. For society, political elites are regarded as the authoritative interpreters of a society’s broader perception of its place in the world.Footnote 62 Their perception of the state’s place in social hierarchies is critical – if they misperceive the state’s capacity to provide material well-being and overpromise material gains and recognition, citizens are more likely to develop a distorted set of expectations. Likewise, as I will show in the case study on East Germany, the previously mentioned difficulty of redefining or exiting this particular hierarchy does not mean elites may not try to do so.
As mentioned throughout this section, it is worth re-emphasising that this dynamic of material expectations is not limited to the mid-twentieth century or the Cold War. For instance, the promise of continuously rising living standards seems to have become foundational to the Liberal International Order (LIO);Footnote 63 indeed, politics, for better or worse, has become seen primarily through the lens of growth.Footnote 64 As a result, the scope of policies deemed acceptable by citizens in the core of the LIO, and also beyond it, has narrowed substantially since then. It has reduced politics to ‘non-ideological and technical questions of output and efficiency’,Footnote 65 while recent populist challenges may challenge this status quo and the institutions on which it is built.Footnote 66
Trust and the recognition hierarchy of mass consumerism
I argue in this section that recognition dynamics affect actors by providing or denying them system trust – those who perceive their standing in recognition dynamics to be commensurate with their expected position will perceive their social environment to be functioning and enduring, and others to be trustworthy – they gain system trust. Those perceiving themselves as misrecognised will lack that trust: they are more likely to develop social grievances and are more prone to perceive their social environment as hostile and illegitimately governed. In other words, they become ontologically insecure.
Trust in IR and OSS
The central premise of trust, a concept used cross-paradigmatically in IR,Footnote 67 is that ‘positive expectations about others’ actions and intentions are the basis of social life’.Footnote 68 Trust is integral for managing uncertainty and anxieties. That is, since an actor’s physical and social vulnerability is constant and full protection is unattainable, they counter it with ‘attainable inner trust’.Footnote 69 The few OSS accounts that have engaged with theorisations of trust have either treated the presence of trust as general disposition that helps actors to shield themselves from uncertainty, or have elaborated in more detail on its absence.Footnote 70 However, towards whom trust is extended and against what specifically actors are being inoculated often remains ambiguous.Footnote 71
OSS scholarship theorising the presence of trust primarily sees it as a foundational disposition that allows actors to engage in other, more positive forms of creating ontological security. For example, Jennifer Mitzen, employing a Giddensian theorisation of trust,Footnote 72 distinguishes between rigid/maladaptive and healthy basic trust.Footnote 73 Healthy basic trust refers to an actor’s capacity to be confident that ruptures will be temporary and routines will be re-established.Footnote 74 Such actors are more likely to comprehensively reflect on which routines would be more productive for them to adopt. Importantly, Mitzen’s account identifies trust as a foundational prerequisite for other, more positive forms of creating ontological security: learning (because it requires ‘a capacity to accept uncertainty’) and the pursuit of ‘higher’ needs beyond physical security-seeking, such as ‘sociation, development, and self-esteem’.Footnote 75 A similar line of reasoning has been developed by Kinnvall, who argues that trust can ‘sustain’ actors’ ‘hope and courage’ in ‘debilitating circumstances’.Footnote 76
OSS’s theorisation of the absence of trust, on the other hand, demonstrates that these accounts assume that this absence directly exposes actors to ontological (or physical) insecurities. For instance, Jennifer Mitzen depicts actors who experience rigid/maladaptive trust as more likely to treat ruptures to their routines and practices as highly threatening and likely to adopt any routine to stabilise their environment.Footnote 77 The result is the establishment of routines that are harmful for the actor’s physical security.Footnote 78 Similarly, Subotic and Steele show that moral injuries, a particularly profound ‘loss of control’, undermine an individual’s sense of trust ‘in oneself, in other people, […] and in society at large’.Footnote 79 In other words, particularly debilitating experiences not only reduce an actor’s capacity for particularised trust, that is, in say, the people who have inflicted trauma upon them, but also their generalised trust by eroding their confidence in others’ reliability and that institutions positively contribute to society. This sense that profound trauma can undermine trust is also echoed in Gazit’s recent work on violated trust in the context of forced migration.Footnote 80
To sum up, OSS scholarship theorises the presence of trust as facilitative and empowering for the creation of ontological security and its absence as a cause for ontological insecurity. In addition, by invoking routines, many of these accounts highlight the importance of everyday activities as the foundational environment to facilitate the creation of ontological security. Yet what is still missing from such accounts is which structures of social relations are most (or more) impactful in creating an actor’s trust, and, indeed, which kind of trust is likely to emerge. This is especially important since the literature’s focus on the absence of trust implies it is more easily lost than established and maintained. In the next subsection, the paper provides a first attempt at doing so by bringing the notion of system trust into conversation with recognition theory.
Trust and struggles for recognition
The relationship between struggles for recognition and trust is a promising avenue to further theorise the creation of trust in OS. Struggles for recognition are ongoing processes whose outcomes and structural effects inherently have a bearing on whether actors gain or lose confidence in their environment.Footnote 81 By extension, attaching trust dynamics to struggles for recognition helps with resolving the problem of prioritising which social dynamics actors are most likely to take as the central benchmark for generating trust – if a recognition hierarchy is of particular prevalence for having one’s identity and desired status affirmed, social dynamics related to it are also fundamental for the presence or absence of trust. Based on these initial reflections, I propose that actors can gain generalised trust if their desired recognition in the hierarchy of mass consumerism is affirmed, while misrecognition in dynamics related to this hierarchy generates ontological insecurity.
The concept of ‘system trust’ recently developed by Ku and Mitzen is especially helpful for specifying the consequences of an actor’s perception of social hierarchies and recognition dynamics. System trust, which is a variation of generalised trust, is the ‘feeling of knowing that the basic institutions that order our lives will endure’.Footnote 82 It extends beyond an interpersonal relationship or a particular context. It is a trust ‘in the “whole”, the feeling of knowing that the set of basic institutions that shape everyday life, including the political, social, and moral systems, are as they are and will continue in their present form’.Footnote 83 Importantly, this account also helps to solve the issue of ascertaining which set of social entanglements is central to the emergence of system trust: their relationship to a ‘central unit’ that serves as a stand-in for trust in the system as a whole.Footnote 84 This central unit, I argue, is the recognition hierarchy of mass consumerism and citizens’ perception of whether their aspirations within it are adequately being met.
Consequently, assuming that the central unit of generalised trust is the recognition hierarchy of mass consumerism, citizens are likely to develop system trust if they perceive they are being provided with the standard of living that they are expecting. Importantly, this does not mean that the ‘objective’ level of affluence that actors possess shapes whether they feel affirmed or not.Footnote 85 What matters is citizens’ perception of their society’s comparative economic performance vis-à-vis another society against which they are comparing their well-being. As a result, societies that are comparatively worse off than those at the very top can still generate system trust for their citizens. The state’s political elites are key actors in facilitating the emergence of generalised trust; their capacity to maintain an autobiographical narrative that articulates an aspirational and reasonable set of claims about where their society should be positioned in international recognition hierarchies is central for this. Citizens are especially likely to accept this narrative either if they perceive the state’s narratives about affluence and mass consumerism to accurately reflect how they perceive the working of the economy in their daily lives, or if the aspirations of future comparative well-being articulated in that narrative appear reasonable. There are a number of ways to ascertain whether generalised trust is present. For one, actors perform the routines and rituals of daily life without existential dread or anxiety.Footnote 86 An important additional indication of widespread generalised trust is that there is no presence of grievance-driven politics that questions a society’s foundational myths and narratives.Footnote 87 Finally, leaning on established conceptions of trust in OSS suggests an indication of its widespread presence is that such a society is more capable of withstanding future ruptures as the result of built-up generalised trust in the system.Footnote 88 And finally, following Mitzen,Footnote 89 individuals inhabiting such a society will be more easily facilitated to engage in forms of ontological security creation.
Generalised distrust, then, emerges when citizens perceive that the standard of living they expect to experience is not being provided to them. Once again, this perception is shaped by both the state’s narration of the economy and whether actors perceive their daily lives to resemble the state’s narrated recognition aspiration. Comparisons to significant external others are especially important for this process. For example, a state that keeps promising a catch-up in living standards to a neighbouring country but then consistently fails to deliver on this promise will cause distrust, in not just the government but also eventually the system itself. Importantly, this process does not require comparison to one particular state but can also take the form of comparisons between entire ‘civilisations’ or alliance blocs.Footnote 90 In addition, system trust is also likely to be absent when the state’s narrative seeks to redefine an understanding of society’s place in that hierarchy (or even seek to exit it) and citizens disagree with such sentiments. Following established OSS scholarship and Ku and Mitzen’s notion of generalised trust, then, suggests that the absence of trust in the central unit as a stand-in for the system as a whole generates profound ontological insecurity. This is likely to manifest itself in anxieties surrounding the state’s decline and widespread dissatisfaction, or even grievances, which in turn may generate a widespread sense that the state possesses low legitimacy. The more widespread and profound this ontological insecurity, the more likely such societies are to see the emergence of political narratives challenging the state’s foundational myths or, in particularly extreme cases, the rise of open physical challenges to the state’s authority.
These dynamics, so far discussed on the domestic level of analysis, also affect wider security dynamics on the interstate level. Struggles for recognition are not simply ‘imaginations’ or fantasies of citizens that leave states unaffected – seeking to create an autobiographical narrative for citizens, and lifestyles they consider appropriate, that generates recognition for the state and for citizens inevitably has a bearing on interstate relations. For instance, states may adopt antagonistic nationalist narratives to further legitimise their policies, or they may engage in policies that require investments unlikely to yield net material benefits in the long run. Here, the approach developed in this paper directly speaks to the wider scholarship on state consumption,Footnote 91 struggles of recognition,Footnote 92 and status competitions.Footnote 93 Importantly, this neither means that interstate relationship inevitably become conflictual, nor that the (mis)recognition generated as a result fixes interstate relationships to the point of stasis. Recognition struggles are ongoing and evolving dynamics, which also means that citizens’ (and states’) hierarchical aspirations can change over time.Footnote 94 Finally, a corollary of this discussion is that recognition struggles have important structural dimensions; that is, one actor’s acquired generalised trust may engender the absence of trust and hence ontological insecurities in other actors.Footnote 95
Mass consumerism and trust in post-war Germany
I will now apply these arguments to two related case vignettes, how the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany [FRG]) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany [GDR]) engaged in a struggle for recognition in the context of mass consumerism during the 1940s and 1950s. In the FRG case, generalised trust emerged because individuals found narratives to be representative of their lived experiences within the economy and because they felt the state’s espoused identity within this hierarchy to be adequately affirmed internationally. By contrast, the GDR aimed to redefine the meaning of mass consumerism by instead espousing a notion of collective (as opposed to individual) affluence. It also tied its recognition to overtaking West Germany’s living standards. Yet citizens rejected the GDR’s alternative form of consumption politics and developed grievances towards the regime when the promised catch-up did not occur.
Before properly diving into the case studies, it is worth briefly engaging in some historical contextualisation of these related cases. The central takeaway here is that the structural position of these two states made a competition around mass consumerism particularly likely. Germany’s destruction and occupation after the war meant that citizens were keen to regain a sense of material comfort, a desire widely prevalent throughout post-war Europe during this period. In addition, the de-legitimation of Nazism meant that whatever new states were to emerge in its wake had to legitimise their political cultures from the ground up.Footnote 96 The emergence of a divided Germany also meant that the FRG and GDR engaged in a competition to be the only legitimate German nation-state. The onsetting Cold War turned this into a proxy competition over which bloc offered the superior vision of modernity, the West’s liberal capitalism or the Soviet Union’s Marxist socialism.Footnote 97 The recognition hierarchy of mass consumerism and the standard of living were the key fields in which this competition took place across the iron curtain.Footnote 98
West Germany – constructing the economic miracle
The West German state that was founded in 1949 committed itself heavily to Westernisation and hence the adoption of a Western-style liberal market economy.Footnote 99 Accommodating and narrating Germans’ recognition desires in the context of mass consumerism was central to this. In this process, the meaning of being a German citizen was redefined around being a participant in the ‘social market economy’ and the ‘economic miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder) that reshaped the German economy. The term social market economy, developed by the Christian Democrats (CDU), refers to ‘a middle way between pure laissez-faire capitalism and the collectivist planned economy’.Footnote 100 Rather than simply hoping that Germans would eventually accept this new economic system, elites engaged in an extensive public relations campaign to legitimate it and to anchor it at the heart of the new German state.Footnote 101
From the early 1950s onwards, the German economy underwent an enormous post-war recovery now commonly referred to as the ‘economic miracle’. In the thirteen years between 1950 and 1963, the average German worker’s wage trebled from DM 343 to DM 975.Footnote 102 While the average German family spent 46 per cent of its income on food in 1950, this figure went down to 36 per cent in 1963.Footnote 103 The 1950s and 1960s also gave rise to the supermarket, motorisation, new household devices such as the washing machine, and television, cinema, and the music industry as unifying, society-wide pastimes,Footnote 104 revolutionising citizens’ everyday lives in the process.
While these numbers are impressive, it is important to highlight that this resurgence started from a low level and was initially limited to a minority of the population. The government’s narrative that citizens lived in a society that would eventually generate prosperity for everyone was therefore central. The government actively invoked the narrative of the economic miracle as a central foundational myth that tied citizens to the new state and articulated a vision of the state’s place within the hierarchy of mass consumerism. Embracing the narrative of Germany as ‘Wirtschaftswunderland’ (country of the economic miracle),Footnote 105 Germans developed an understanding of themselves as members of a collective imagined community of affluence and consumerism. This narrative directed individuals’ attention onto the economy’s performance and came to understand its effects as representative of what it meant to be German more generally – being German now came to mean being a member of a society that looked after everyone, was hardworking, and created manufactured goods of high craftsmanship envied by the rest of the world. Germanness was ‘won through contributions to the economic welfare of the nation’,Footnote 106 and ‘the restoration of what had been destroyed, the expansion and modernization of […] industrial capacity in every area, down to the last piece of kitchen equipment’.Footnote 107
Particularly important for this shift was the perception that the German economic model was democratic and inclusive rather than solely communist or capitalist, making the ‘social market economy’ a major source of nationalist pride.Footnote 108 This manifested itself in citizens’ everyday experiences, especially in the tangible rise of consumer affluence, which created a world of lifestyle consumerism that included ready-to-wear clothing and home entertainment products on a societal scale.Footnote 109 From the mid- to late 1950s onwards, the consumer ‘exercising free choice in a free-market context came to figure as the very embodiment of the democratic citizen’.Footnote 110
This suggests that West German society generated generalised trust. This is especially likely because new consumer routines emerged that allowed for individualisation and new lifestyles, a factor highlighted by Giddens as a central dimension of the creation of ontological security.Footnote 111 For instance, the post-war era saw the emergence of a distinct youth culture,Footnote 112 if not the construction of youth as a distinct period in life, which both allowed for individualisation within broader collectives. Similarly, mass consumerism also allowed for appropriating goods from abroad rather than just interacting with those produced domestically. This allowed citizens to identify as transnational, metropolitan consumers and further affirmed their recognition aspirations to be part of the West. Coca-Cola, for instance, became a positive symbol of consumer capitalism in West Germany. While many Germans were sceptical about the seemingly low-brow connotations of Americanisation, consuming Coke became synonymous with partaking in a ‘Weltanschauung’ rather than just consuming a fizzy drink.Footnote 113
In short, a functioning economy provided Germans with generalised trust. However, while the new consumer society generated these effects at scale, it would be a mistake to engage in a Whiggish understanding of this process that sees consumerism as a force adopted without resistance. The left and the right contested what they regarded as Americanisation, framing it as morally bankrupt and as ‘quiet terrorism of conformism’.Footnote 114 And while widespread, the greatest effects of affluence remained limited to the middle classes until the 1960s. This gradual emergence of affluence demonstrates the importance of elite-generated narratives for recognition and the emergence of generalised trust. What made this inequality work, then, was that those worse off still experienced materially fulfilling lives to be accessible to them in the future, something successfully captured by the German state’s narrative of the social market economy and of consumer affluence as egalitarian.Footnote 115 This also suggests the case’s difference to many recent instances of widespread inequality – it has become more palpable while the promise of social mobility has faded at the same time, generating populist grievances on the left and right.
In sum, the onset of mass consumer culture in West Germany illustrates the emergence of generalised trust. However, as discussed throughout this paper, the nature of recognition dynamics is that they inherently affect other actors, frequently negatively. I will turn to this dynamic now.
East Germany – attempts to catch up with West Germany
For the GDR, meeting the challenge of affluence and economic stability became an existential struggle during its first two decades in existence.Footnote 116 There were two reasons for this – first, many GDR citizens had familial ties to citizens in the West, while its borders remained open until the construction of the wall in 1961. This gave East Germans a second-hand experience in the ‘economic miracle’. Emigration (Republikflucht) thus became a constant challenge for the regime.Footnote 117 About 15 per cent of the East German population left the country until the erection of the wall,Footnote 118 a process that had significant ramifications for the regime’s stability.
Second, the GDR faced the double pressure of engaging in a nationalist competition with the FRG and of being the Eastern bloc’s frontline state. This not only made it particularly exposed to Western hierarchies of mass consumerism, especially since the emerging Eastern bloc remained a participant in the global economy,Footnote 119 but also meant that Western observers of the Eastern bloc took a special interest in its developmental trajectory. As a result, the Soviets came to treat the GDR as its socialist model state that was too significant to fail, and that had to demonstrate socialism’s prowess to the world.Footnote 120
Economic development, and at least economic parity with the FRG, therefore quickly became the GDR’s central political objective throughout this period. In the eyes of the SED (the country’s socialist governing party), economic strength was the key for gaining legal recognition of its state,Footnote 121 for stabilising the country internally, and for demonstrating socialism’s superiority towards the West. Indeed, socialism effectively compelled the SED leadership into seeking a recognition struggle with the FRG in the first place. Marxist–Leninism’s self-understanding as alternative ideology to Western liberalism required opposition to the West and legitimated itself through showcasing that it could provide a society with more affluence.Footnote 122 This is captured well by Walter Ulbricht’s (SED leader and Politburo chairman) remarks to the party leadership in 1949, in which he declared that ‘the execution of this two-year plan will show the entire German people that the democratic path of the German People’s Council will lead to success, that the economic order is superior to the economic anarchy of West Germany, and that this is a living example for all of Germany’.Footnote 123
How SED elites sought to achieve this was incompatible with the dominant understanding of the recognition hierarchy of mass consumerism as a provision of individualistic affluence. The regime’s approach to economic managerialism was rooted in ‘productivism’, the notion that the economic process was driven by state-directed investment in heavy industry.Footnote 124 Individuals, and demand generated through their market behaviour, had reduced importance in this vision. However, this does not mean that the SED outright rejected the notion of the standard of living; for SED elites, it was social security and secure employment that were meant to provide affluence.Footnote 125 The SED’s objective was therefore to redefine the recognition hierarchy of consumerism along more ideologically amenable lines.
Party elites commonly argued that a collective understanding of living standards was superior to an individualistic one, while simultaneously claiming that the West was in decline. Ulbricht argued that ‘as a result of the double enslavement by American and West German monopoly capitalism, the living standard of the West German will continue to sink’.Footnote 126 Similarly, author Hannah Wolf argued in an article in Einheit, a party mouthpiece, that the notion of higher Western living standards demonstrated ‘the entire lack of knowledge about the real conditions in the Soviet Union, as well as the false, unscientific interpretation of the term “standard of living”’.Footnote 127 Consequently, the SED overtly attempted to construct a narrative of living standards that was separate from the West. Legitimacy was to be generated instead through the creation of an ‘egalitarian society in which the materialistic individualism that still plagued the West would finally be transcended’.Footnote 128
Notably, however, this redefined understanding of consumerism accepted the underlying assumption that living standards mattered and that the West had to be outcompeted for gaining recognition. The provision of Maslowian and conspicuous consumption goods therefore effectively became the litmus test for the regime’s legitimacy. In the words of Katherine Pence, consumption was the ‘most conspicuous link between the fruits of the socialist economy and the everyday life of the population’.Footnote 129
The East German population rejected this attempt to redefine the meaning of living standards. Ordinary citizens attributed critical importance to the provision of mass consumer goods. Strong evidence for this are the complaint letters written to Elli Schmidt, the leader of the State Commission for Trade and Provisions, a government agency established in early 1953 to address consumer problems.Footnote 130 These letters are replete with complaints indicating that citizens regarded everyday economic conditions to be incompatible with what they perceived as the material lives they were entitled to. The letters illustrate well the daily concerns of ordinary citizens, such as incredulity at having to get by in a system of constant scarcity and constantly changing prices. For instance, one letter from early 1952 asked ‘why were there no vegetables this whole winter? Even cabbage and carrots [were] only available for children and certain sick people. How long will the fat and butter restrictions last?’Footnote 131 This scarcity did not just affect consumers. Small shops and businesses complained about either the unreliable nature of deliveries or their frequent absence altogether.Footnote 132 These conditions were humiliating for shopkeepers, who were reliant on supply systems run by the state that were clearly malfunctioning. Daily life in the early GDR was therefore highly unpredictable – it was never clear whether the desired good could be acquired. This was disastrous in a command economy, since citizens could directly attribute these failings to the state. In other words, systems in which state and economy are effectively conflated seem particularly vulnerable to decline in system trust.
Citizens articulated overt discontent with the enduring nature of this provisioning crisis and even directly stated that it affected their overall trust in the regime. In one letter, a woman complained that the ‘latest measures [price regulations and reductions in ration cards] hardly contribute to a strengthening of trust. How should they understand all the measures, they who only ever see their smallest circle, their family, their local area, at most, their district?’Footnote 133 What this letter and many others share is an acknowledgement that citizens regarded consumerism and affluence as benchmarks for their trust in the regime at large, and, indeed, that they directly blamed the state for failing to provide basic material necessities. At the same time, the letter’s language suggests that this letter writer at least, if not many more, had a sense that the elite was implementing these policies from a distance without regard for the general population’s well-being, a further point indicative of growing distrust and rising grievances.
The relatively polite language employed in such letters should not be taken as a lack of frustration – citizens knew they lived in an authoritarian state and that they needed to at least overtly comply with the regime’s transcript to remain unscathed by its oppressive powers.Footnote 134 That the commission was swarmed by such letters in the first place strongly suggests that people expressed even greater frustrations behind closed doors. Such growing distrust cannot be ignored in authoritarian regimes, especially if they have totalising claims about the social and political organisation of life – over time, even minor complaints about competence can create lasting collective distrust.
During the early 1950s, economic conditions gradually worsened, as the SED sought to implement collectivisation in the countryside, leading to further economic dislocation.Footnote 135 At the same time, the intensification of the Cold War forced the SED to redirect enormous sums into building an army from the ground up, further reducing funds that could have been used to stabilise the economy or to facilitate consumer affluence.Footnote 136 These interrelated material dynamics surrounding mass consumerism and economic expectations more generally have direct consequences on ontological security and trust. This manifests directly in the June 1953 uprising and its consequences. By June 1953, generalised distrust as a result of these interrelated dynamics had become so widespread that more than one million people revolted against the government. Just days before this uprising, the government had proclaimed a ‘New Course’ to pre-empt increased discontent, which promised the prioritisation of consumer products.Footnote 137 That the government had finally understood that it seemed to be incapable of redefining the population’s understanding of mass consumerism can be illustrated in an article published in the daily Tägliche Rundschau, which justified the U-turn by arguing that ‘the population expects from industry that it produce greater quantities of beautiful and comfortable shoes, fabric in appealing colours and styles, lovely and practical furniture, flatware, and other commodities’.Footnote 138 The regime also sought to detach itself from the crisis by proceeding to lay blame on producers, implying that ‘private retail has received new opportunities to actively participate in the improvement of the standard of living of the working population of our republic’,Footnote 139 thereby creating a distinction between retail and state that hardly existed in reality.
Yet even once the regime seemingly prioritised the issue, many measures only highlighted its incapacity to compete with the FRG. A central reason for this was that the GDR never abandoned productivism, a decision that imposed great fiscal pressure on the regime, as it dedicated resources to heavy industry and consumerism simultaneously.Footnote 140 Consequently, the result was not that the regime changed its economic policy from the ground up – it quietly abandoned the ‘New Course’ just months in. Ulbricht, who had always been opposed to an individualistic depiction of mass consumerism, gradually delegitimised it. In June 1955, for instance, he argued in a Central Committee meeting that
neutrality toward bourgeois ideology and superstition has grown. Our call to foster a happy life for the working masses has led many functionaries to encourage a selfish, materialist outlook. What is more remarkable about this Course is not that it is new, but that it is wrong. I must warn people with these ideas that we never meant to, and never will, embark on this kind of mistaken course.Footnote 141
Consequently, rationing remained in full force until 1958 and was even partially reintroduced later.Footnote 142 In addition, the few consumer goods that were incorporated into the regime’s five-year plan (with ongoing rationing in other areas) quickly made clear that the quality, quantity, and variety of goods expected by the population could simply not be met.Footnote 143
In sum, the GDR’s attempt to redefine the recognition hierarchy it was forced to compete in failed because its autobiographical narrative overtly promised unrealistic material benefits. The population therefore developed generalised distrust, and hence ontological insecurity, towards the state. A growing mutual distrust between population and state set in that had lasting effects on the SED’s approach to ensuring its survival. From the 1953 uprising onwards, the GDR relied on Soviet military and economic support to survive.Footnote 144 In 1961, it built the wall to prevent more citizens from escaping westwards. Interestingly, however, the regime’s failure at gaining recognition did not lead to a change in rhetoric. In the spring of 1958, the government announced that the GDR would surpass the FRG’s living standards by 1961,Footnote 145 an objective that was never met. While material conditions in the GDR did improve in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to what some historians have referred to as a ‘welfare dictatorship’,Footnote 146 the SED remained in constant hypervigilance about the regime’s stability as a whole.
Conclusion
This paper has explored the relationship between consumption, mass consumerism, and ontological (in)security. It first highlighted the multiple dimensions in which consumption and OSS intersect, before then arguing that mass consumerism should be conceptualised as a recognition hierarchy. Afterwards, the paper demonstrated that recognition struggles are important for shaping citizens’ trust. By providing citizens with recognition in the context of mass consumerism, citizens gain generalised trust, a sense that the social system they inhabit will endure and affect them positively.Footnote 147 In this way, it was shown that trust facilitates actors’ capacity to engage in other activities and practices that generate ontological security. Consequently, being more confident in the stability of their environment through system trust, actors should be more likely to establish long-term stable routines, to reflexively develop lifestyle aspirations that provide them with a sense of agency and individualism, and to participate more frequently in pursuits of rhetorical and aesthetic creation. Such conditions also facilitate the emergence of autobiographical narratives that allow actors to develop more solidarist, intimate, and stable relationships to those around them.Footnote 148 States that unsuccessfully seek to affirm identities and aspirations in the context of mass consumerism, however, are likely to generate ontological insecurity. The absence of trust creates a lack of confidence that one’s social environment will endure and that others, including the state itself, are trustworthy. This manifests itself in discontent with existing social arrangements, the adoption of maladaptive routines and autobiographical narratives, social grievances, and even challenges to the state’s (or a social system’s) legitimacy.
The paper illustrated these dynamics with two case vignettes, the competition between West and East Germany to provide their citizens with higher relative living standards. In West Germany, elites created an autobiographical narrative that redefined German nationalism around the promise of enduring affluence and the prevalence of mass consumer goods. Citizens accepted this framing by the state because it was matched with their everyday perception of the economy, generating generalised trust. The East German state, however, unsuccessfully attempted to redefine the meaning of living standards towards collectivism. This failure generated widespread distrust, leading to discontent, an uprising, and a long-term lack of legitimacy for the regime.
By taking this approach, this paper has made several contributions that require further research and additional contextualisation within the special issue. First, a central takeaway from the arguments presented in this paper is that dynamics beneficial for some may still be detrimental to others. The paper is not the first OSS contribution to suggest that emancipatory and positive dynamics have such effects. Accounts on humour,Footnote 149 friendship,Footnote 150 or cooperationFootnote 151 all implicitly suggest that such negative second-order effects on other actors may be generated. To articulate the importance of such dynamics is not to condone them, nor to endorse a zero-sum perspective of social relations in which some can only benefit at others’ expense, but to highlight them as important structural effects to be understood. Scholarship on the ethics of OS will have an important role to play in further understanding such processes.Footnote 152
Second, this paper directly speaks to some of the other contributions to this special issue. For one, placing the paper’s focus on mass consumerism in the context of works on the climate crisis further reinforces not only the prescient nature of the subject matter addressed by these papersFootnote 153 but also the inherent danger of permanently attaching processes of social recognition to dynamics that will ultimately erode the natural foundations of the world we share. In other words, future research will have to address the temporal implications of ontological security-seeking: practices that created OS for actors fifty years ago may no longer do so today or in the long run. In addition, more research is needed to understand to what extent actors adopt long-term or short-term thinking when engaging in the routines and practices that keep their world going (or will ultimately erode it).Footnote 154 The enduring nature of the consumerist hierarchies discussed in this paper suggests that many actors do engage in such short-term thinking.
Third, by exploring the presence and absence of trust in the empirical context of mass consumerism, the paper also contributes to OS as a theorisation of routines. An earlier generation of this type of scholarship has received criticism for inadequately addressing how far such processes reinforce existing hierarchies and the status quo.Footnote 155 Some of these dynamics are also present in this paper – yet whether this status quo is beneficial or detrimental is an empirical question. It does not make such an inquiry a priori illegitimate. An objective in covering this dynamic was to demonstrate that everyday politics (and hence trust), even if they reinforce the status quo, still facilitate subsequent processes that can be emancipatory, creative, and solidarist. Some of them have been covered in this special issue, including processes that involve flow and aesthetics.Footnote 156
Finally, this paper demonstrates the importance of bringing OSS into conversation with processes involving the economy. It speaks to IPE debates about how states accommodate demands for and perceptions of prosperity, the pressures arising from that, and the implications for how states organise their economies domestically and position them internationally.Footnote 157 The dynamics covered in this paper are only one dimension of a much more complicated dynamic towards which future OSS research should pivot. For example, the production process itself, in its sociological and ideological dimensions, is a promising domain capturing citizen–state relations in greater detail. An especially promising, and timely, avenue in this direction also appears to be inflation – its potentially harmful effects on (dis)trust, routines, and ontological (in)security further highlight dynamics of which this paper was only able to scratch the surface.
M. L. Kirsch is a researcher at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and an academic associate of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. His research explores the experience and role of elites and ‘ordinary’ people in international politics, the relationship between affluence, status, and national security, the role of modernity and ideologies in the foundation and maintenance of international order, and historical and contemporary conservatism and right-wing politics. He can be reached at mlk47@cam.ac.uk.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ayse Zarakol, Jack Ellis, Connor O’Brien, Cornelia Baciu, and Brent Steele for feedback and comments on several iterations of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the Cambridge Comparative Politics and IR Workshop and the other authors of the special issue on ‘Creating Ontological Security’ for their comments and feedback of several drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the editorial team of the European Journal of International Security, the editors of the special issue, Brent Steele and Cornelia Baciu, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments during the review process.
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