Rituals and symbols

In a security community, the mutual experience and communication of shared emotions can be said to create feelings of mutual belonging and contributes to an affectionate state of solidarity. The social locus for sharing these feelings is the performance of solidarity rituals. A ritual is understood as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’.Footnote ³³ Rituals involve the physical assembly of the members of a social group, their awareness and focus on a common object or action, and the sharing of similar emotions through their expression and discourse toward these objects or action.Footnote ³⁴ Such symbolic rituals produce so called ‘high-order meanings’ that lead to mutual identification between Self and Other.Footnote ³⁵

Rituals thus function as mechanisms to synchronise individual emotional states, to define social roles and status, commit members to future actions and sharpen the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.Footnote ³⁶ This takes place through properly performed and standardised verbal and gestural emotional expressions that ultimately draw the community members closer together. Rituals are thus fundamental to maintaining stable emotional communities because they make members aware of their membership. Durkheim describes this process: ‘It is no longer a single individual speaking, rather it is a group incarnate and personified.’Footnote ³⁷ When we look at the concept of security community, similar mechanisms can be found there as well. These involve shared experience and communication, mutual understanding and trust, a sense of ‘we-ness’, and a sense of boundary toward outsiders.Footnote ³⁸ Symbolic rituals in a security community (for example, NATO summits, joint military exercises, or commemorating events) create high-order meanings necessary to maintain social order and collective identity.

Symbolism plays an important part in these rituals. Symbols may be defined as ‘orders to recall something from memory’.Footnote ³⁹ Deutsch underlines the importance of symbols in a security community: ‘By noting which symbols are frequently associated with each other, we may learn something about the context in which political messages are perceived, remembered, and recalled on later occasions’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Symbols contribute to identify political meanings in a given situation. Empirically, symbols are traceable in different forms such as abstract symbols (words, ideas, slogans), pictorial symbols (codes of arms, flags), personal or human symbols (heroes, leaders, saints, prophets), or symbolic places (capital cities, historic sites, national shrines, centers of pilgrimage).Footnote ⁴¹

Second, symbols perform a representational function by designating a certain group to form collective emotional memories and experiences. In other words, symbols are meaningless unless people grow emotionally attached to them. For example, what it means to be an American evokes a certain conceptual idea of ‘we-feeling’ only among those that can emotionally relate to it. Those that identify themselves as ‘Americans’ share a distinct pattern of collective emotional attachment that is manifested in recurring rituals such as Fourth of July celebrations, presidential inaugurations, and the pledge of allegiance as well as worshiping places and objects with symbolic significance such as the Declaration of Independence or the Lincoln Memorial.Footnote ⁴² More negative examples that show that the process of binding people together often works in tandem with pernicious representations of Others include the Nazi efforts to install collective emotions through a variety of resentment and hate strategies and the extensive use of collective symbols and rituals.

Symbols play an important role in solidarity rituals at the intergovernmental and transnational level such as speeches, summits, ceremonies, youth exchanges or festivals that contribute to maintaining an emotional community. In a Durkheimian sense, the symbolic meaning of a particular object or person acts as a prism that concentrates the particular emotional ‘colors’ of individual group members into a collective bundle of shared emotional meanings. In a security community ‘individuals are reminded of what values the group sanctions, how they are able to orient emotionally to those values, and what the consequences will be if they are violated’.Footnote ⁴³ In this sense, symbolic rituals reaffirm existing emotion norms by reducing the complexity of emotional expressions and by managing emotional expressions and communication.

Knowledge and power

Conceptualising security communities as emotional communities does not render questions of power irrelevant. Members exercise power over outsiders through selective membership as well as over insiders by expressing ‘negative’ emotions such as anger in cases of non-compliance. Power, of course, derives not only from material sources such as military force, size of a country's population and territory, its economic performance, and natural resources but also from non-material sources such as human resources and organising skills, ideas, knowledge, access to and processing of information, social experience, and political institutions as well as history and culture.Footnote ⁴⁴ Deutsch and his associates refer to the former kind as ‘power’ while they term the latter kind ‘responsiveness’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Adler makes a similar distinction between the material resources to accomplish certain goals (power) and the authority to define collective meanings and practices (knowledge).Footnote ⁴⁶ While both material and non-material sources of power are important in a security community, scholars studying the subject agree that knowledge (understood as creating shared meanings) plays a crucial role in a security community.Footnote ⁴⁷

Understanding security communities as emotional communities points to the epistemological centrality of emotional knowledge. Emotional knowledge is an agent's ability to cognitively and morally categorise emotional expressions and to emotionally connect these affective categories to Others’ identities based on experience over time.Footnote ⁴⁸ In other words, members have to be able to know what it means to be angry, ashamed, or happy in order to understand its social implications and evoke appropriate emotional reactions toward others within a particular social situation based on previous experience and moral judgments.Footnote ⁴⁹ For example, anger can be interpreted as destructive to close relationships because one may have experienced the destructive nature of anger in previous relationships. At the same time, anger may be perceived as displaying the closeness of a relationship based on a very different emotional experience.

Emotional knowledge is based on intersubjective learning, that is, the habituated establishment and recurring exchange of emotions that shape the identities of social actors. One member communicates emotions to other members who then give emotional feedback and, in turn, receive emotional feedback on their part, and so on. Through this perpetuating process of emotional socialisation, members of an emotional (security) community can enter a stage of understanding by building a common emotional history together which contributes to the establishment of shared meanings and even trust.Footnote ⁵⁰ In sum, emotional knowledge is about orientation and meaning. It is the accumulation of memories, founding myths, experiences, and symbolic patterns that enables members to make sense of the world around them within an emotionally shared reality.Footnote ⁵¹

Process sociology has shown how emotional knowledge forms part of asymmetries of power and status in which ‘established’ groups secure the compliance of outsiders.Footnote ⁵² Insiders maintain and reproduce a particular self-image of social superiority vis-à-vis outsiders based on group charisma and emotional knowledge (feeling of social superiority/pride). At the same time, established groups persuade outsiders to internalise feelings of social inferiority (shame) through emotional rigidity, stigmatisation, and by placing the contact of insiders with outsiders under a taboo. Accordingly, contact with outsiders is associated with negative feelings. Through these figuration processes, ‘inside’ groups exercise and maintain a power asymmetry that is rooted in emotional knowledge.Footnote ⁵³

Inside an emotional (security) community, members are not treated as approximate equals but are woven together in asymmetrical power relationships. The self-image of the established group is formed based on the minority of its ‘best’ members (core group). This core group performs a norm building function and exercises power over potential or actual norm breakers through control and stigmatisation.Footnote ⁵⁴ Members can only participate in an emotional community by complying with certain emotional patterns of affect control. Members who do not comply by siding with or showing sympathy toward outsider groups will risk losing their power and status within the ‘inside’ group. In other words, the core group is able to teach and enforce emotion norms. The notion of a core group corresponds nicely with Deutsch's notion of ‘cores of strength’ within a security community. Security communities develop around cores of strength that possess material and moral authority due to their superior material power, international legitimacy, and acquired norms and practices.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the transatlantic (emotional) security community, it seems fair to suggest that the US forms such a core.

In sum, processes of emotional socialisation involving power and status are constantly present in an emotional (security) community and reproduced through knowledge: less superior members assimilate in relation to more powerful core groups, rivalling other members for status and power, shaping and reshaping their emotional experience and group charisma, or responding in ways that satisfy other members.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hence, emotional knowledge and power are interwoven: communicating and transferring emotional knowledge within and between groups constitutes and maintains power relationships.

Collective identification and trust

Ritualised and symbolic interaction generates emotional knowledge and understanding. However, the ability to recognise that, how, and what the other is feeling is still a long way from feeling with another agent. Without the ability to emotionally connect with others, mutual understanding as the basis of interstate trust remains sketchy at best. The presence of shared emotions may simply be a coinciding event. For example, two political leaders may laugh about the same joke or pick up an infectious smile. Even though this feeling along with each other may lead to sympathy, it does not generate collective action based on empathy.Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, simply responding to the emotions of others is not to be mistaken for responsiveness in a security community. In the former case, the Self simply picks up the emotions of the Other by making it their own. In the latter case, the Self identifies with the Other by feeling exactly the same kind of emotions. Empathy thus requires sharing the same emotions by ‘placing oneself psychologically in that other person's circumstance’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Feelings of empathy can also be found in a security community. Take for example, the emotional solidarity expressed within the transatlantic security community in the aftermath of 9/11. When the United States faced a collective trauma on 11 September 2001, NATO members expressed spontaneous and sincere positive emotions. 200,000 took the streets of Berlin to show their solidarity with the United States. In Britain, the US National Anthem was played during the change of guard in front of Buckingham Palace.

In a mature (pluralistic) security community like NATO, members will be more inclined to share their emotions with each other simply because they trust each other. Community members will then tend to express similar emotions in a given situation. Michel's conception of trust is helpful here. He distinguishes between trust as an emotive disposition, which precedes cooperative behaviour, on the one hand, and strategic trust, on the other hand (which he calls ‘reliance’), which follows from cooperative behaviour.Footnote ⁵⁹ A similar account is presented by Booth and Wheeler who distinguish between functional ‘trust-as-predictability’ and emotional ‘trust-as-bond’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The latter conception of trust thus represents an emotive and moralistic disposition: ‘Trust emerges here as a moralistic disposition which guides and influences behavior by structuring our engagement with the world’.Footnote ⁶¹ This conception of trust-as-bond mirrors the main argument about the binding role of emotions in an emotional security community. Since trust-as-bond is based on normative rather than strategic cooperation, harming strategic trust (reliance) will result in mere disappointment without questioning the meaning of action. The loss of emotive trust, on the contrary, will generate feelings of betrayal, which shake the foundations of community. In other words, a perceived betrayal by members of the emotional (security) community would result in much deeper and intense emotions (anger) than feelings of disagreement or disappointment (I will return to this point below). In sum, the link between trust and the idea of an emotional connection among members of an emotional (security) community is based on a member's moral judgment of the overall integrity and character of a particular other member expressed through the empathetic sharing of emotion norms.

Counterarguments and alternative explanations

This degree of mutual identification and trust in an emotional (security) community requires norms about acceptable and appropriate emotional expressions that will be specified in the following section. Prior to this, it seems necessary to engage with possible counterarguments and alternative explanations in order to lay out explicitly the specific contributions of emotions as explanatory factors in a security community.

Janice Bially Mattern, for example, argues persuasively that identity can be a source of order in security communities during crises. According to her argument, member states can use language power or representational force to repair or recreate a broken-down identity. By representational force, Bially Mattern means ‘a forceful but non-physical form of power exercised through language’ that leaves a victim with the non-choice between suffering and compliance.Footnote ⁶² In this sense, Bially Mattern offers a similar analysis yet entirely different explanation of security communities in crises. To be fair, Bially Mattern does not deny that identity also includes emotional bonds. Yet, her analysis centers on configurations of sociolinguistic identity in which a security community is stabilised during crises through the strategic use of forceful language or ‘linguistic guns’.Footnote ⁶³

The argument in this article, on the contrary, revolves around configurations of socioemotional identity in which a security community is stabilised during crises through the expression of appropriate emotions in a given situation. While it is true that such emotions can be expressed through discourse, identity in an emotional security community is not represented by language but by the emotion norms communicated through language. In this sense, the article views identity not as a sociolinguistic but instead as a socioemotional construct.

Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argue that security communities are ‘communities of practice as they tacitly practice peaceful change’ through background knowledge or habitus.Footnote ⁶⁴ These authors view practices as the natural and self-evident way of solving inter-state disputes in a security community at the exclusion of violent practices. From this perspective, the non-representational dimension of trust as one of the key constitutive factors of a security community derives directly from common practices and thus becomes the habitus or background knowledge of this community. Pouliot goes even further to argue that practices are the ‘engine of social action’ and constitute peace as a social reality in a security community being thus prior to instrumental rationality, norm compliance, or communicative action.Footnote ⁶⁵

The logic of practice as articulated by Adler and Pouliot, however, does not grant emotions the role of a separate explanatory factor in analysing security communities. In fact, in his earlier work, Adler explicitly states: ‘To grasp the process by which mutual responsiveness develops in pluralistic security communities, we must understand community not as a matter of feelings, emotions, and affection, but as a cognitive process through which common identities are created’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Also, the logic of practice emphasises the non-representational dimension of trust in a security community. By contrast, the concept of emotional (security) community finds itself within the ‘representational bias’ pointed out by Pouliot as opposed to the logic of practice because the concept of emotional (security) community stresses the importance of collective emotional standards and norms, which it defines as representations of prior moral judgments.Footnote ⁶⁷

Ted Hopf uses the security community concept to illustrate how the logic of habit predominates among a particular group of states. His conception differs somewhat from Adler's and Pouliot's account: ‘A security community of habit is less reflective, purposive, agential, and normative than a security community of practice.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Hopf treats emotions and habits as almost interchangeable concepts and argues that, ‘security community members expectations are also reinforced by habits of affect … that blocks reflective consideration of one's responses to their actions, ensuring a reinforcing spiral of amity’.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Hopf, habitualised emotions of amity thus make a security community more stable.

At first glance, Hopf's assumptions appear to be similar to the dynamics occurring in emotional (security) communities. There are, however, a number of important distinctions to be made that clearly separate emotion norms from emotional habits. First of all, the logic of habit (similar to the logic of practice) assumes that security communities are ‘not to be based on trust’.Footnote ⁷⁰ By contrast, trust (based on mutual identification) constitutes one of three conditions of emotional security communities outlined above. Second, emotional communities are based on collective learning. The logic of habit, on the contrary, is ‘the antithesis of learning’ because learning requires a reflectiveness denied by habit.Footnote ⁷¹ Third, and for the same reason, the logic of habit excludes any form of ‘moral calculations’.Footnote ⁷² In this article, it is argued instead that, in emotional security communities the expression of emotions is a moral act that is based on a cognitive appraisal of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. More precisely, the article defines emotions as moral judgments that reflect an intellectual appraisal of present expectations and past experience. Such moral appraisals and judgments presuppose a reflectiveness that stands in contrast to both the logic of practice as well as the logic of habit, which emphasise ‘automatic perceptions, attitudes and responses’.Footnote ⁷³ Finally, the logics of habit and practice fundamentally depart from the logic of consequence and the logic of appropriateness ‘by stressing that the actions of actors in the world are often not the product of deliberate calculation of any sort, instrumental or normative’.Footnote ⁷⁴ While emotional security communities also depart from the logic of consequence, they can still be said to operate within the logic of appropriateness by stressing the role of emotion norms.

Finally, Lucille Eznack argues persuasively that affect influences inter-allied relations and explains how affects during a situation of crisis can be viewed as ‘signals of strength’ rather than heralding the demise of that cooperative relationship. She illustrates her point by using the cases of Britain and the United States during the Suez crisis in 1956 as well as of France and the United States during the Iraq crisis in 2003 and by contrasting these bilateral cases to the relationship between Turkey and the United States in 2003.Footnote ⁷⁵ Eznack's argument shares some commonalities with my own argument in the sense that we both view affect and emotions to be essential for understanding why crises occur among allies in general and within NATO in particular, and focus on political leaders as the affective embodiment of such interstate relationships. Moreover, Eznack identifies norm violations as a mechanism that triggers strong emotional reactions and concludes that such reactions contribute to repairing the ‘relational culture’ among close allies.Footnote ⁷⁶

Apart from these commonalities, however, there are a number of important distinctions to be made. The most important difference lies in the relationship between norms and emotions. Eznack reasons that emotions function as catalysts that intensify and ‘exacerbate’ reactions to prior norm violations of appropriate social behaviour within an alliance.Footnote ⁷⁷ My own argument takes a fundamentally different approach by understanding emotions as configurations that form a constitutive element of an emotional (security) community. In this sense, whereas Eznack emphasises the sociobehavioural dimension of affect in an alliance (‘norms of appropriate behavior’), my argument focuses on the socioemotional dimension of a security community (‘norms of appropriate emotions’).

Inside emotion norm: amity

Amity produces durable bonds, reliability, and trust in at least three ways. First, it assures a ‘distinctive way of life’ and a sense of belonging that sets the community apart from other areas and regions including the one they previously inhabited.Footnote ⁸⁰ The development of such a way of life is, of course, closely related to the social construction of a collective identity, a sense of community or ‘we-feeling’ in a security community.Footnote ⁸¹ Second, amity encourages community members to respond to each other's needs, messages, and behaviour in a way that enables members to resolve their conflicts peacefully. Finally, through processes of learning the emotional expressions of community members align in a way that enables them to predict one another's intentions and, ultimately, to overcome feelings of uncertainty. This alignment of individually expressed emotions creates a background condition for peaceful interaction by developing shared meaning. In an emotional (security) community, members feel secure through an intensified emotional state of connectedness and belonging: They ‘lose their selves in the others’.Footnote ⁸² In sum, the norm of amity performs important functions within an emotional (security) community: It encourages mutual commitment, responsiveness, and predictability and thus contributes to the stabilisation of collective identification and mutual trust.

Amity among members of an emotional (security) community is expressed through collective feelings of empathy, pride, guilt, gratitude, grief, honor, respect, compassion, or sympathy. However, as pointed out above, in case certain members display emotional indifference or non-conformity, one would expect other members to react with anger or dislike. Such expressions of ‘negative’ emotions within a security community are perfectly compatible with the norm of amity because they carry a fundamentally different meaning than the outside emotion norm of enmity described below. Members, due to the emotional knowledge established over time, are able to differentiate between both meanings. While the former kind of anger is meant to increase the gap between insiders and outsiders the latter kind signals closeness and emotional attachment to the community in order to repair an internal state of crisis.Footnote ⁸³

Shame constitutes the corresponding feeling to anger in an emotional (security) community. It signals the presence of a moral trespass and a threatened bond. Shame and embarrassment indicate dissatisfaction with one's impression in the eyes of other members based on a negative response.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, shame in response to anger monitors and regulates the degree of unity and division within the community: Once shame is acknowledged social bonds can be repaired. Denial of shame, however, results in further alienation and division.Footnote ⁸⁵

Outside emotions norm: enmity

Enmity also builds trust among members of an emotional security community by setting insiders apart from outsiders and thereby generating internal cohesion. Disconnecting insiders from outsiders is an act of identity building necessary for developing and maintaining a security community.Footnote ⁸⁶ In an emotional (security) community, amity and enmity are two sides of the same coin. Collective identification in a security community cannot be treated in isolation but can only be fully understood if viewed as an emotional construction of a (or multiple) shared Other(s). Such a shared Other must not exclusively be defined in strictly military terms such as an outside military threat but contains a much broader concept based on regime type (for example, democracy vs. non-democracy), cultural or religious differences (for example, Occident vs. Orient), and/or spatial concepts (for example, the Atlantic area vs. the Pacific rim). Thus, the norm of enmity must not primarily be defined in terms of material or physical coercion but rather in terms of a perceived risk or harm to the distinctive ‘way of life’ of an emotional (security) community.

It is certainly not suggested that all non-members are considered a threat in the sense that they threaten the physical survival of the inside group. It does emphasise, however, that such inside/outside figurations sharpen the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. This is particularly the case in crisis situation (such as the Libya intervention) when members of an emotional (security) community become locked into an insider-outsider dualism that is hard to disrupt and leaves little room for differentiation.Footnote ⁸⁷ Neither does this figuration negate the possibility of new members to join. It does suggest, however, that these new members will enter the community not as approximate equals but as members with inferior status and power vis-à-vis established members. Underlying this power asymmetry are fears of losing identity and social cohesion on behalf of the core group.

Enmity toward outsiders is expressed through collective feelings of fear, anger, jealousy, envy, rage, dislike, hate, bravery, or courage. As laid out above, the emotional knowledge generated within an emotional (security) community helps members to distinguish between, for example, anger expressed by community members towards insiders (amity) and anger expressed by community members toward outsiders (enmity).

Building on the argument raised in the beginning, the following case study is meant to illustrate how emotion norms stabilised the transatlantic security community by diffusing the potentially damaging effects of inter-member conflict. The case study is chosen because the vote in the UNSC on Resolution 1973 represents a recent yet understudied case of transatlantic conflict management. Similar arguments could be made about other transatlantic conflicts like the Iraq crisis in 2003 or the Suez crisis in 1956. Any of these conflicts provides a formidable case study to demonstrate the presence of emotions in a security community since such situations tend to produce extreme emotional expressions that can be empirically traced and documented by the researcher.

Amity

The decision for military intervention in Libya was controversial among NATO members from the very start. With France and Britain actively pushing for military enforcement of a no-fly zone to protect the Libyan opposition, the United States and Germany (along with others) remained at first sceptical of fighting another war in the region. In March 2011, however, the US changed its position when it became clear that a humanitarian crisis in the city of Benghazi was immanent. In addition, the Arab League came out in support of a no-fly zone, and Security Council veto powers China and Russia signalled that they would not block a UN resolution to authorise the use of military force. Germany, in contrast to its NATO allies in the UNSC, held on to its position not to become a war party in Northern Africa opting instead for more far-reaching economic and financial sanctions against the Gaddafi regime.

The German abstention in the UNSC on March 17 must have been a shock to political leaders in France, Britain, and the US because Germany could have supported the resolution without automatically having to contribute troops. The symbolic meaning of the abstaining vote thus proved to be much more destabilising than the material lack of German military capabilities. As an important member of the transatlantic security community, Germany had, for the first time, openly sided with non-members like China, Russia, Brazil, and India in the UNSC on a significant security issue leaving France, Britain, and the US isolated. What shook the community's foundation was thus less Germany's refusal to participate in the military intervention – many NATO member countries chose not to participate militarily – but Germany's refusal to offer political and moral support for the mission. As a result, Germany's symbolic move was interpreted as an open display of emotional indifference, an undermining of solidarity and trust or, bluntly speaking, as ‘a stab in the back’.

In defending its position, Germany was quick to point out that its decision to abstain on UN Resolution 1973 was not to be mistaken with indifference or even sympathy for the Gaddafi regime.Footnote ⁹³ Instead, Germany portrayed its decision as a rational choice, a process of logical reasoning, a ‘difficult evaluation process … of weighing up the pros and cons’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The underlying emotional motives of the German decision-making process – the ‘concerns and fears about the consequences of a military operation’ based on Germany's ‘painful experience’ in the past – were, at least initially, sidelined in public declarations and speeches.Footnote ⁹⁵

Disappointed by the emotional indifference expressed by Germany, NATO members could hardly conceal their anger at the German government. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé was rather polite when he said that, ‘I would have liked to see us accompanied by Germany.’ Anonymous voices in the French diplomatic service spoke more bluntly of a German ‘mistake with unpredictable political consequences’ and a ‘crisis’ within NATO. Echoing French diplomats, the French newspaper Le Monde wrote ‘the German government is lacking solidarity or any maturity’. The French magazine Le Parisien even quoted a French diplomat who directly attacked the German Chancellor: ‘Our relationship is getting markedly colder … Angela Merkel will have to pay for this!’ These statements clearly reveal that French policymakers no longer viewed Germany as an equal and instead attempted to coerce and seek revenge.Footnote ⁹⁶ This notion is further substantiated by Le Figaro, which cites another French diplomat who calls the German UNSC abstention ‘a severe blow to the Franco-German friendship’. Another statement by the French foreign minister Alain Juppé even conveys the threat not to cooperate with Germany in the future: ‘The common security and defense policy of Europe? It is dead!’Footnote ⁹⁷

In a meeting of the EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Alain Juppé, supported by his Danish colleague, Lene Espersen, confronted Guido Westerwelle directly with this anger stating that ‘if we had not intervened there would have probably been a bloodbath in Benghazi’. In NATO headquarters, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen openly accused the German NATO representative of violating group solidarity. In response, the German representative interrupted the NATO meeting by leaving the room.Footnote ⁹⁸ But Rasmussen went on to link his anger at Germany directly to the transatlantic norm of amity: ‘Obviously some of those allies and partners carrying the heavy burden start to ask whether it would be possible to broaden the participation a bit … That is also the essence of our alliance: that allies that actually have the necessary assets at their disposal, also contribute those assets, based the principle of solidarity.’Footnote ⁹⁹

As pointed out above, in an emotional (security) community, such meetings represent ritualised performances symbolising solidarity and their abrupt disruption undermines social cohesion and trust among its members. Accordingly, members of the House of Commons spoke of ‘obstruction’ and ‘cowardice’ while British Prime Minister David Cameron did not even attempt to defend Germany against such accusations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In Washington, President Barack Obama wrapped his anger into a not so subtle verbal side blow against Germany: ‘Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Setting Germany apart from the rest of the group, Obama left out Germany when he spoke of ‘our close allies’.Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, in April 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose Berlin of all places as the venue for making clear just how angry American leaders were at Germany. In front of her predominantly German audience, Clinton evoked emotions of shame and embarrassment: ‘The world did not wait for another Srebrenica in a place called Benghazi.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Subsequently, at a NATO meeting on 8 June, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates linked the American anger to the transatlantic norm of amity by demanding German solidarity as ‘a matter of fairness in an alliance built on the principle of shared burdens’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In a similar way, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé criticised Germany for undermining allied solidarity when he argued that ‘NATO must play its full role, and it is not doing so sufficiently’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Finally, in a joint declaration by state leaders Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron published simultaneously in the International Herald Tribune (New York), Le Figaro (Paris), and the Times (London), they hardly hid their collective anger at the German norm violation of amity by calling the German lack of solidarity in Libya ‘an unconscionable betrayal’ and that opposition to the Gaddafi regime needed to ‘begin with a genuine end to violence, marked by deeds not words’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Consequently, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, and British Foreign Minister William Hague argued in similar ways.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Such allied finger pointing reveals high levels of collective stigmatisation and emotional rigidity against the German norm breakers by equating abstention in the UN Security Council with ‘betrayal’.

In addition to these direct expressions of anger against Germany, there were also more subtle forms of passive anger.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ For example, at the G8 Summit in the French seaside resort of Deauville in May, the leaders of the G8 met in a seaside restaurant to discuss the Arab reform movement and other regional issues. When the Libyan military intervention came on the table, the five parties involved in the air campaign – Canada, Britain, France, Italy, and the US – continued the meeting without German Chancellor Angela Merkel.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is hard to imagine that the disruption of such an important symbolic ritual at the G8 summit by physically excluding one member would not have resulted in any emotional impact on German political leaders.

Indeed, German political leaders began to publicly express solidarity toward Britain, France, and the US by complying with the emotion norm of amity. When Angela Merkel addressed fellow party members in the German Bundestag, she wished the allies success and conceded that the decision to abstain on Resolution 1973 had been made ‘with a heavy heart’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In various speeches and remarks by members of the German cabinet in the following days and weeks, an emotional pattern emerged that stressed the norm of amity by expressing ‘gratitude’, ‘honor’, and ‘respect’ vis-à-vis other security community members.Footnote ¹¹¹ German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle underlined that: ‘We respect and understand those partners … who … came to a different conclusion than we did. We understand those who, for honourable motives, chose to support international military intervention in Libya.’Footnote ¹¹²

Up to this point, the overall performance by Britain, France, and the US can be viewed as sanctioning the emotional non-conformity of Germany. This performance was arguably intended to provoke feelings of shame – an acknowledgement that Germany had violated the inside emotion norm of the transatlantic security community. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, for example, wrote in a contribution to a German national newspaper that he felt ‘nothing but shame for the failure of our government’.Footnote ¹¹³ Other members of the German political elite reacted in similar emotional ways. Former German Chief of Staff and former head of NATO's military planning committee, Klaus Naumann, echoed Joschka Fischer by stating: ‘I am ashamed of the position of my country.’ In the German media, Richard Herzinger, an influential journalist writing in the conservative newspaper Die Welt, criticised ‘the shameful way that Germany emerged as the party seeking to delay action’ and the liberal German weekly newspaper Die Zeit published a headline calling the Libya intervention ‘A German shame’.

Feelings of collective shame among German political elites were not, however, confined to inactive policymakers like Joschka Fischer. Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, a prominent member of the German Bundestag, shouted in a parliamentary debate on Libya: ‘I think it's a shame that the federal government, as a member of the UN Security Council, abstained in this situation.’ The head of the oppositional Social Democratic Party, Sigmar Gabriel, followed suit depicting the vote in the UNSC as ‘simply undignified’. Omid Nouripour, defence spokesperson of the Green Party in the German Bundestag, also found allied anger over the German vote in the UNSC understandable: ‘This was a disgrace!’ But even in her own party, Merkel faced the repercussions of allied anger expressed, for example, by her German parliamentary spokesperson for foreign policy, Philipp Mißfelder, the chairperson of the foreign relations committee in the European Parliament, Elmar Brok, as well as Ruprecht Polenz, head of the foreign relations committee in the German Bundestag, who all feared that Germany had lost its previous status and trustworthiness among members of the transatlantic security community as a result of the UN vote.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Moreover, a usually calm and collected Günther Oettinger, EU Commissioner for Energy and also a fellow party member of Angela Merkel, responded to a question on Libya at a press conference in a very emotional way: ‘In Berlin, they can say what they want, to the point of embarrassment!’Footnote ¹¹⁵

Feelings of shame and embarrassment are usually equated with inferior status. In an emotional (security) community, it means the loss of ‘love and respect of those whose approval matters’ and it is this type of appraisal that can lead to social conformity.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As pointed out above, acknowledging feelings of shame can lead to reconciliation and community-building while denial of shame leads to further isolation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the Libyan case, it can be tentatively argued that German political leaders indeed felt shame resulting from the emotional expression of anger and disappointment expressed by important community members. As a result, Germany became emotionally disconnected from the rest of the group. In order to regain its previous status within the community, Germany, at least implicitly, acknowledged feelings of shame by conforming to the inside emotion norm of amity, thus expressing feelings of gratitude, honor, and respect toward its fellow members. In addition to the feelings of collective shame cited above, Angela Merkel's statement that she was ‘saddened’ by the political discussions among NATO members following the UN Security Council vote points into this direction.Footnote ¹¹⁸ When it did, arguably, the door for reconciliation opened again.

This process of transatlantic reconciliation – following Germany's reaffirmation of solidarity and symbolically underscored by the decision to step up its military surveillance in Afghanistan to disburden NATO members involved in the air campaign over Libya – was embedded into a series of community-building symbolic rituals. On 14 April, the NATO ministers of foreign affairs held their meeting in Berlin (of all places) to issue a joint statement on Libya that included a reaffirmation of NATO unity and solidarity. On 7 June, Barack Obama awarded the German Chancellor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the highest civilian award in the USFootnote ¹¹⁹ – and granted her the first state dinner for a European head of state during his presidential term. This public expression of mutual gratitude, honor, and respect – a ‘unity reviving ceremony’Footnote ¹²⁰ – was accompanied by highly emotional remarks by the US President and the German Chancellor that ushered an aura of intimacy between both political leaders. In his remarks, Barack Obama underlined the degree of emotional identification between both leaders by stating that, ‘it is our joint will that this NATO mission is successful … we have one heart of allies that beats with the other allies’.Footnote ¹²¹ Angela Merkel, on her part, stressed collective ‘pride’ of the German-American heritage, and ‘gratitude’ for the US role in World War II. On several other occasions during her remarks, she emphasised the metaphor of transatlantic ‘friendship’ and linked it to her own personal emotional experience:

The day before the award ceremony, Barack Obama gave an interview to a German newspaper (his first interview with a German print media since his inauguration) in which he talked about his personal ‘feelings’ for his ‘friend’ Angela Merkel. In tune with the German Chancellor, the US President appeared eager to stress the emotion norm of amity expressing ‘respect’, ‘gratitude’, ‘admiration’, and feelings of ‘trust’.Footnote ¹²³

In sum, Germany's decision to abstain on UN Resolution 1973 was interpreted by Britain, France, and the US as an open display of emotional indifference and thus, a violation of the community's inside emotion norm of amity. Britain, France, and the US sanctioned the non-conformity of Germany through the expression of anger and by setting it apart from the rest of the group. This appears to have produced feelings of shame and embarrassment on the German side accompanied by a loss of power and status within NATO. In order to regain its previous status within the community German political leaders publicly expressed emotions that reaffirmed the norm of amity, which led to a process of reconciliation. It can thus be reasonably claimed that in the Libyan case the emotion norm of amity stabilised the emotional (security) community and contributed to a ritualised process of reconciliation on the inside.

Enmity

The Libyan intervention was accompanied by recurring public emotional expressions of anger, dislike, and even outright hate toward the Gaddafi regime by NATO's political leaders. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, depicted the Libyan leader as

Barack Obama described Muammar Gaddafi as a ‘murderer’ and a ‘terrorist’ whom he found to be involved in ‘brutal repression’ and exercising a ‘grip of fear’. In a joint statement, David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy spoke of the ‘violent dictatorship’ of ‘Qadhafi's war machine’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Likewise, Angela Merkel and Guido Westerwelle made it clear in various public statements that Germany regarded Gaddafi as an illegitimate leader who ‘has to go’.Footnote ¹²⁶ More forcefully, Guido Westerwelle underlined ‘the brutality of the Libyan regime’ and stated that ‘I denounce and condemn the horrendous violations of human rights committed by the Libyan regime … We stand against this dictator.’Footnote ¹²⁷ His fellow party member and German minister for economics, Phillip Rösler, publicly referred to ‘Gaddafi's homicide units’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Echoing French, British, and American leaders, Angela Merkel called Gaddafi a ‘despot’ whose ‘disgraceful deeds … shall not remain unpunished’ and whose death made her feel ‘relieved and very happy’.Footnote ¹²⁹ The German president, Christian Wulff, used even more drastic words to describe the Libyan leader: ‘This is state terrorism. This is obviously the kind of act that can be described as psychopathic.’Footnote ¹³⁰ All of these emotional expressions of anger, dislike, and even hate also reappeared in the joint statement on Libya by the NATO ministers of foreign affairs in Berlin cited above. At this meeting, the NATO Secretary General spoke of a ‘desire for freedom’ and contrasted his emotional statement against ‘Gaddafi's brutal and systematic attacks’.Footnote ¹³¹

In addition to these emotional expressions of anger, dislike, and hate NATO political leaders also frequently stressed emotions like courage and bravery when speaking about NATO's military effort in Libya in general and NATO soldiers in particular. For example, on 14 April NATO ministers of foreign affairs paid ‘tribute to the skill, bravery and professionalism of our men and women in uniform carrying out this difficult task’.Footnote ¹³² Barack Obama equally praised the ‘brave pilots that have executed their mission with skill and extraordinary bravery’.Footnote ¹³³ David Cameron stated that the military intervention was undertaken ‘with some fantastic allies and some very brave other countries’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Bravery and courage are essentially emotional expressions of fear: if one is not afraid of someone or something one does not have to feel brave or courageous. Thus, in the Libyan case, NATO members reaffirmed the community's outside emotion norm of enmity in two ways: first, by finding a threatening Other that all members could focus their emotions on; second, by framing the military effort in terms of morally acceptable expressions of fear such as bravery or courage. In sum, by sharing these emotional expressions towards an outsider, the members of the transatlantic security community were able to maintain mutual trust and collective identity by setting themselves emotionally apart from the Gaddafi regime and thereby generating internal cohesion.

In sum, the expression of anger and fear toward an emotionally shared Other can be said to have generated internal relief and social cohesion through processes of emotional identification on the outside.Footnote ¹³⁵ The collective adherence to the outside emotion norm of enmity can be said to have contributed to the stabilisation of the community during a time of internal conflict by strengthening a sense of belonging and togetherness against a common outside foe. It energised the community and provided its members with a collective sense of power: ‘Together we can make a difference. Together we can change the world.’Footnote ¹³⁶ As a consequence, it can be tentatively claimed that the confirmation of the outside emotion norm of enmity contributed to the stabilisation of the transatlantic emotional (security) community that included a symbolic process of emotionally disconnecting insiders from outsiders. In the end, transatlantic conflict over the German abstention in the UNSC was at least in part mitigated through the synchronised expression of appropriate emotion norms on the inside as well as on the outside.