Introduction

This book began by examining the ways in which the national identity, socially transmitted, can provide means of support for the ontological security of individuals. Having examined contributions by figures such as Cruikshank, Grierson and Colley it is clear that there is nothing new in this; that such processes of linking the national identity to the ontological security of citizens and subjects has a long lineage. Indeed, in the sense in which Giddens has reconstructed ontological security from Laing’s work, it is clear that for the majority of individuals, security cannot be achieved without understanding the social, and here national, dimension. Much of this connection is through the imagery and tokens that come to represent that permanent and fixed sense of nation that thereby contributes to the ontological security of individuals. This can be seen in three, interrelated dimensions: shared topics for conversation (and thereby social norms that are accepted as common sense); shared social practices (of appropriate and acceptable ways of behaving); and a shared recognition of the meaning of images. This understanding of the way in which ontological security can link the national identity with individuals’ struggles to keep dread at bay was overlaid in Chapter 2 with a post-Copenhagen securitization theory, developed to understand the construction of contemporary security threats in the United Kingdom. Through particular means, two socially constructed crises – ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’ – have come to be the social mechanisms through which the British Self has come to securitize the Radical Other – Islamic/Islamist/ international terrorism – and has come to (re)construct an Orientalized Other, here being the ‘British Muslim community’. The claim is that these processes of constructing the Radical and Orientalized Other have taken place through language and imagery, and the securitizing actor has been not just the government but also a range of other social agents, including the media, religious figures and academics/public intellectuals.