Mirror Mirror on the Wall, which is the most Fashionable Insecurity of All?

Jef Huysmansfocused his intervention on the Politics of Insecurity, aiming at describing certain crystallizations of the insecurity discourse. Huysmans stressed how the duet diplomacy-military has fallen apart after the events of 9/11, and how the blow has already started with the fall of the Berlin wall. It is in fact at that time of shifting from a bipolar to a polar world order that we lost the ‘enemy’ but we started with uncertainty. The bankruptcy of the diplomatic-military tradition started therefore when the balance between States became a pure balance of physical power.

With the institutionalization of war, diplomacy grew to be an instrument of containment of the physical power. Consequently, the balance of power was a calculated interaction of socio-economic institutions. Today, those institutions have changed their aims and instruments. The tandem diplomacy-military is now concentrating on the creation of societies, institution building and democratic export.

With the aim of specifying the roots of uncertainty, Huysmans highlighted how the shift from bipolarity to polarity did not bring a single polar system with a quantity of country depending on it, but has rather created a constellation of new multi-polarity, in the sense of reconstituting a number of powers under a cultural perspective. According to Huysmans the EU may become one of the new poles to be, although he noticed that the nostalgia for the old machinery is still around and that this slows down the evolution of a new world order.

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