Denial and foreign policy identity crises

In his opening address to the 2015 Millennium conference ‘Failure and denial in world politics’, Stefano Guzzini talked about his work on foreign policy identity crises.

In the first part of his talk, he exposed the commonsensical way in which failure and denial are connected in our discourse: if denial follows failure, then continuous failure will result from repeated denial. In commonsense, such a link can happen in at least three ways.

• A first way is cognitive and is about the limits denial (or a ‘state of denial’) imposes on the capacity to correctly decipher the world. Such incapacity will, in turn, prompt future failures.
• A second way to think this commonsensical link is moral. Denying an apology or confession, fails to initiate the socially expected process of ‘repenting and redeeming’.
• Finally, a third way is political or practical. Concealing a mistake to allow policies to proceed can become a trap where all future political moves must ensure that the original deception is not discovered. In a reversal of ends and means, the concealment meant to open up political room of manoeuvre, ends up prompting policies that only serve to hide the concealment, as Nixon during Watergate.

In the second part of the talk, he introduced his previous studies on foreign policy identity crises. Rather than ushering in a period of security, the end of the Cold War provoked identity crises in the foreign policy discourses of several European countries between self-understandings and external role recognitions. The analysis shows that there are several ways to resolve this dissonance:

1. ‘adaptation’ where the external identity rules of respectable recognition are eventually taken over (e.g. apartheid South Africa),
2. ‘imposition’ where countries try to change the international rules for recognition such as to meet their self-understanding,
3. ‘negotiation’ where the dissonance is supposedly simply a misunderstanding and
4. ‘denial’ where the dissonance is not even imaginable since otherwise the self-understanding would be shattered in its most fundamental part.

In the last part, Guzzini developed two further possible reactions to this dissonance which are connected to the conference theme of denial in yet another way. In both reactions, the dissonance is not resolved but managed. One way consists in not letting foreign expectations to overrule self-understandings, an attitude of ‘no apology’ for fear of being otherwise ostracised. Yet, just as the commonsensical link of failure and denial would have it, this act of denial meant to become acceptable to international society perpetuates a country’s marginalisation. Finally, there is a form of denial, ‘mimicry’, which consists in selectively imitating and accepting the rules but to protect some autonomous identity discourses. In particular this latter dissonance accepting reaction puts pressure on the stability of underlying rules of recognition in international society and can, in turn, provoke dissonance therein: the underlying norms are not static and are relationally reproduced. Indeed, it is not impossible signs of a major identity crisis of international society itself, as the rise of postcolonial soul-searching shows.