Prime Minister Donald Tusk claims that in the name of state security, he would channel significant measures against the activists from the Last Generation movement, who announced blockades of main traffic arteries in Warsaw in order to force the government to consider the deepening climate crisis seriously. We have a right to assume that Tusk is not joking. After all, it was he who, a few months ago, announced a suspension of the right of asylum on the territory next to the Belarussian border – also in the name of state security. State security also motivated the President of South Korea when, on the 3rd of December 2024, he announced a farcical – since it lasted only a couple of hours – martial law, suspending the parliament and the majority of civil liberties in his country.
Security requires the Indian prime minister to uphold for years a completely non-farcical state of exception in Kashmir and push the Muslim population – a tenth of the country – to the position of second-grade citizens. President Putin hid behind security when invading Ukraine; it was also in the name of security when Prime Minister Netanyahu started a genocide in Gaza. On the other hand, humanitarian organisations and the UN demand a ceasefire to provide security for the bombarded aggression victims in both places – radically differing from certain NATO states rejecting a ceasefire in Ukraine – naturally, in the name of security.
Security has become a national priority, a skeleton key used to open the way to justifying the most controversial actions while also providing a means to criticise such actions. It is even found on the banners of radical progressivists when they demand safe and secure spaces in universities and on the Internet. Security overshadowed democracy, social justice, freedom of speech, and open borders. Given security’s dominance, all social wins achieved during the last two hundred years are now conditional. We may afford them only if they do not collide with security’s ruthless constraints.
A Meaningful Change of Meaning
Yet, the success of security is merely one aspect of the discussed phenomenon. The other lies in the historical semantics of the notion of security, showcasing its transformation in the last three decades. This remains a key to comprehending the character and impact of the Great Securitisation, in which we participate regardless of our wishes.
In a certain way, the security we cultivate now is not what it used to be thirty years ago. At its core, it is a negation of the previous meaning. Previously, security used to form a basis for the social structure of modern politics and political subjectivity, but now, in most of its forms, it connects to depoliticisation. An emblematic example of the connection between security and refutation of politics is found in Israeli politics towards the Palestinians. In all of its displays – occupation, ethnic cleansing, colonisation, apartheid regime, and genocide – it comprises what one should label a national security paradigm. As such, it fulfils the same idea in all its forms. It relies on depriving its victims of material, symbolic, and social conditions of self-determination as a political community. As the Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper notices, the Israeli government aims at transforming Gasa and other Palestinian enclaves into human storage space, a form of a Middle Eastern favela, under the reign of universal alienation, unemployment, violence, and drugs, while particular loyalties to clan, ethnic and religious groups replace any political subjectivity with its demands of universality. That is why another Israeli intellectualist, a political scientist, Baruch Kimmerling, is correct when he does not refrain from calling the deeds of his country’s army in Gaza a politicide.
When did it begin? The war on terrorism was undoubtedly a turning point, yet even before, the direction of transformation was delineated by how formally democratic governments reacted to the alter-globalist movement. It culminated in state and police mobilisation by Silvio Berlusconi’s government against mass protests during the G-8 summit in Genoa a few weeks before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. A few days of police crackdown resulted in violent street combat, the death of one protester and thousands injured and beaten after being captured by the police. Along with the accompanying media campaign exploiting the rhetoric of criminalising protesters, the operation was the first since the eighties so coherent and blatant manifestation of security’s primacy over freedoms of speech, movement, or political self-organisation – all in the heart of the European Union. But the Genoa events, which can, in accordance with Jacques Ranciére’s theoretical scheme, be called police superseding politics, comprise a capper of the long process marked with, as the thinker labels it, hatred for democracy.
The nineteenth-century discourse includes a notion of “a dangerous class, ” which needed to be kept at a distance not only from the fruits of economic expansion but mainly from legal and political progress. Its popularity was an expression of spontaneous antidemocratic ideology characteristic of the consciousness of the Western bourgeoisie in the first century of its hegemony in industrial capitalism. Security denoted mainly police practice of surveillance and repression of groups deemed to threaten the existing order – even if they were simultaneously necessary for its extended reproduction. For a few decades, we have observed its triumphant return in the context of the system’s structural crisis and implementation of neoliberal control strategies. It is the economy of the neoliberal regime of accumulation that creates a space in which police security has gained a foothold.
Capitalist insecurity and social security
In her most recent book, The Age of Insecurity, the American director and political writer Astra Taylor connects the primacy of ideology and politics of security to the spread of insecurity (precarisation). She also points out that a tendency toward pracarisation has been present since the onset of European capitalism and is thus inscribed in its DNA, shaping the historical emergence of the system. She recalls Mark Neocleaous, a theoretician of politics, who pointed out that the very word “insecurity” was coined in the 17th century along with the emergence of capitalism and the birth of the modern era. The contemporaneous world, so brilliantly described in the anthropological pondering of Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, comprised an almost ideal embodiment of omnipresent and inescapable precarity – of human existence, social structures, and systems of values. The overlapping catastrophic effects of economic, medical, and climatic crises pestered humanity for most of the century, leading to the permanent destabilisation of ways of life and production in entire societies. This paved the way for primary accumulation, which emerged from the violent response of the privileged classes to rapid and durable deficiency of goods and the lack of stability of social order. Without the effect of crises’ synergy, it would be difficult to imagine the European privileged classes managing to overcome resistance, expropriate land, or even enslave parts of Euratlantic plebeian classes. Only after plebeians had been deprived of means of production and ways of autonomous fulfilment of their needs was it possible to condemn them to dependence on volatile markets governed by powers of state and capital. Since then, the insecurity created by the accumulation requirement became an integral element of the lower-class conditions. To paraphrase Marx, the logic of unlimited accumulation caused all things deemed stable by the poor to dissolve into thin air. Also since then, the abolition of fabricated insecurity marked a horizon of combat for working-class movements in the industrial era.
Thanks to them, security is defined in social categories. It occurred with plebeian intrusions into the political field, overcoming its classical limits, delineating the framework of modern politics, and establishing public spheres as we know them. Security understood as freedom from all that contributed to capitalist manufactured insecurity – meaning the arbitrary class rule, market whims, ruthless exploitation, squalor, famine, death from curable diseases, and the nightmares of unsupported old age – paved its way with gains achieved by subsequent waves of strikes, workers’ rebellions, and anticolonial uprisings. In the second half of the nineteenth century, social security appeared on banners of successive revolutions; in the first half of the twentieth century, it became one of the strategic markers of social politics implemented in communist countries while simultaneously being an element of the Keynesian project in the West. What is more, Keynes’ concepts are based on correct recognition of capitalist market volatility (in contrast to the notion of risk consecrated by liberals) and propose a response to it, i.e., designing a social security system, full employment, and industrial democracy.
The brief hegemony of social security in political thought and practice of the West ended with a stagnation crisis of the welfare state in the seventies and the trap of debt which occurred simultaneously in the Third World and parts of the Eastern Block (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia). These processes served as a pretext to dismantle the system of social rights and induced the process of semantic transformation of the notion of security. During the consequent decades, the less security appeared in the sphere of fulfilling needs and alleviating market volatility, the more demand for police security appeared.
Neoliberal precarisation and demand for police
Neoliberalism did not reinvigorate capitalism. It protected gains at the expense of decreasing growth rate, expansion of the financial sector, and, most importantly, switching direction of the redistribution stream created by the wealth economy. David Harvey captured the essence of the new regime by calling it “accumulation through expropriation”. The condition of its success – as in the era of primary accumulation – was found in breaking the workers’ resistance and precarisation of their forms of life. The alliance of capital and states commenced an attack on organised worker movements, accompanied by an attempt at delegitimising some specific forms of their actions. Unanimous termination of working joint agreements, limits imposed on the right to strike – including the prohibition of solidarity strikes, multiplying obstacles in establishing and functioning of worker unions, and, finally, destruction of egalitarian proletarian culture came into being due to a mix of cultural-political counterrevolution, police repressions, structural unemployment, and increasing inequality.
One of the qualities of the neoliberal regime of accumulation is found in limiting the spectrum of political choice, most visible in the economy. In Europe and the USA, regardless of which party controls the ministry of finance, one notices a tendency to eliminate economic politics and substitute it with expert governance, de facto concomitant with forcing interests of dominant capital segments. Subsequent spheres of power and economic practices escaped from democratic control imposed after the Second World War due to the pressure of worker movements. If, following Harvey, we notice that neoliberalism restores class dominance, we cannot be surprised that it introduces special privileges for the police and liberalisation of labour laws accompanied by restricting criminal codes. The means of breaking the spines of groups protesting against this restoration varied, but they all shared a common effect. Capital in Europe pacified the workforce with a spectre of very real unemployment; in the USA, the impoverished working class was pacified through criminalisation and incarceration of racialised poverty or – as Löic Wacquant puts it – imprisoning destitution.
The other method of weakening workforce position is the securitisation of border politics. One needs to remember that – similarly to the times of first industrialisation – migrants, both internal and external, comprise a significant element of key production and logistics areas of the modern economy. That is why all restrictions of border politics ricochet in the negotiating power of workers at large. That is how one needs to interpret the class dimension of a process of the last dozen years based on transforming borders from places of realising the right of movement and asylum into a militarised space of exclusion and racialised selection. Securitisation of border politics in the EU de facto suspended the right of asylum before any bureaucrat in the EU thought of it.
Current security politics are not a return to a pre-Keynesian era, just like neoliberalism is not a simple continuation of capitalism from before the Great Crisis of 1929. We are at a different place. Security politics does not utilise the rhetorics of dangerous classes, even if it does not hesitate to use the category of dangerous district. Class terminology is generally rejected as too political, and population replaces society. Thus, it refuses to acknowledge group affiliations and consequent aspiration, both on the side of the protected groups and those from which they are protected. This aspect of securitisation gained full visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic when the physical isolation of workers coincided with the mass application of new digital tools of control and the eruption of platform capitalism of invigilation.
The outlined social alienation imposes on its victims the necessity to adjust to new conditions defined by omnipresent insecurity (of employment, labour, health, quality of public services, communication, etc.). Meanwhile, it tries to compensate for this by redefining security based on police categories. It is no longer collective but individual; it does not promise progress in living conditions but the defence of – ever more measle – wealth. This movement concomitates a shift from class solidarity to treating others as competition (individually) and threat (collectively), from which we could be protected through transformed security. In the neoliberal regime, workplaces cease to be spaces of collective subjectivity and exercising agency. They are an arena of competition between individuals, while the old class solidarity is replaced by an individual sense of threat posed by others, defined through their skin colour, gender, or confession. Such particular identity markers – and not universal categories of equality, justice, or worker rights – become the main stakes of antagonisms and emblems of depoliticised forms of revindication. This is a real, existing, material basis for the grassroots desire for security provided nowadays by postneoliberal states.
Both social and police security are based on the capitalist state. However, there are fundamental differences. The prerequisite for the former was the democratisation of the power apparatus influenced by pressure from organised forces of subjugated classes. This forced the state to take into account the antagonistic character of capitalist forms of socialisation striving to represent society as conflict-based. Meanwhile, the state providing police security has different ambitions—it embodies the particularisms of the privileged.
Imperialism – security in lieu of peace
On a global scale, securitisation connects to the militarisation of international order, erosion of the system based on the UN and international law, and the increase of inter-imperial competition. The background of these processes consists of the demise of the existing hegemonic setup in the capitalist world-economy and political-economic bifurcations accompanying a transitional period, labelled by Antonio Gramsci as the time of monsters. All that facilitates the primacy of warfare over negotiations and political compromise. In these conditions, the common desire to provide international security is contrary to a desire for peace. It is best visible in the unlimited war on terrorism announced by the President Bush Jr. administration in the autumn of 2001. It ignited a process of depriving smaller states and non-state actors (e.g. national liberation movements) of the status of negotiating partners equal to hegemons, thus degrading them to the roles of fallen states or criminal forces. In this case, the refusal of recognition means the refusal of peace.
As one does not negotiate with terrorists, so one does not make peace with illegal entities. One can only destroy or pacify them. In this sense, superpower care for security does not eliminate violence (e.g., occupational) but, on the contrary, solidifies it and legitimises it. The logic of securitisation thus creates a brand new situation, which is undoubtedly no longer peace but does not fulfil formal requirements of the state of war. As non-peace, it is characterised by depriving the subjugated population of a right to political expression and self-determination. As non-war, it allows the lack of compliance with obligations from the Geneva Convention. Both enable distortion of the border between civilians and hostile forces and between hostile forces and illegal fighters (terrorists). In this legal and political limbo, violence is not Clausewitz’s politics realised by different means but a method of governing a depoliticised populace. This is the essence of the strategy of asymmetrical conflicts, stabilising missions, humanitarian interventions, hybrid actions, militarised state-building operations, or special operations undertaken by superpowers in the peripheries of the global system.
Securitisation accelerators
The transformation from politics to police occurs nowadays on virtually every level of social practice. It is inscribed in the hegemonic cycle, crisis governance of the transitional period, and in response to reaching environmental limits of unlimited capital accumulation. The parameters of new insecurity create an ecological environment fostering the expansion of the Great Securitisation. The accelerators of the process are found in both the logic of administering capitalism and reactive strategies of adjustment to capital-imposed conditions applied by excluded and exploited. Securitisation creates the restoration of capital-produced insecurity and is, at best, used to mitigate its social consequences. Agreeing to the irremovable nature of fabricated insecurity is treated as a miracle solution to threats it produces. Meanwhile, these threats are defined through crucial elements of social security, like social democracy, political forms of class antagonism, or redistribution politics. It should not be a surprise. If social security enabled modern politics, police security would treat it as a threat to be eliminated.
Translated by Mateusz Myszka
Przemysław Wielgosz – editor, publisher, essayist. Editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique – Polish edition, editor-in-chief of the book series People’s History of Poland, publisher, essayist and curator of discursive cycles, including the cycle Przeobrażenia. Nienaturalna historia kryzysów środowiskowych. He has published, among others, in Przekrój, Pismo, Dwutygodnik. Author of the books Witajcie w cięższych czasach (2020), Gra w rasy (2021), editor and co-author of the books Ekonomie przyszłości (2021), Ludowa historia kobiet (2023).
