ABSTRACT
Securitizations can happen quickly. The time that passes from an emerging accumulation of securitizing statements to the multiplication of such representations of existential threat in the wider public resulting in a situation of ‘consent in the audience’ is not necessarily very long. This swiftness is logical, given the urgency that is constructed in most securitizing narratives, but it cannot be taken for granted. It is conditioned upon the consistency of the narrative and how well it is argued, but also upon the discursive terrain, the specific cultural context in which the securitization takes place. In the case of Russia in autumn 1999, the official securitizing narrative was built up and presented to the Russian public in the course of less than a few months before the most radical emergency measure – war – was undertaken. As explained in the previous chapter, the securitizing narrative put forward by the Russian leadership was not only frightening, but also consistent, simple, onesided and supported by strong visual images. The security argument itself can be said to have been convincing. And, as we will see, consent emerged fairly quickly (Chapters 7, 8 and 9). The Russian public, broadly speaking, had accepted new representations of Chechnya as a casus belli over which blood would have to run as the tanks rolled into Chechen territory. However, according to the securitization theory elaborated in this book, securitization is not limited to the articulation of a convincing security claim by a few: it is produced in a complex intertextual relationship and draws on previous representations of existential threat as well as those constantly emerging among groups in the public that are construed as ‘audience’, but which are actually also speakers. As suggested in the theory chapter, ‘securitizing moves’ are not launched into empty discursive space, but are structured by and resonate with latent or manifest representations in pre-existing discourses. Existing discourses privilege and disadvantage certain securitizing moves, as opposed to others. A securitizing narrative that resonates well with and draws on recurrent common meanings and identity constructions in the national discursive terrain will acquire legitimacy through this resonance. Representations of Chechnya and Russia, implicit in the official securitizing narrative and presented in Chapter 5, did constitute a break with the dominant official discourse of the interwar period. But that does not mean that there had
not been fertile ground for these representations in historical representations or in more current, non-official representations of Chechnya and Russia. We have already seen how the discourse of war was strong in Russian media representations as well as in those of the FSB during the inter-war period (1996-1999). This chapter presents a broader outline of discourses on Chechnya and Russia prior to 1996. I cast the net much wider in time and space to uncover the discursive terrain which the 1999 securitizing move was launched into and which it fed on and resonated with. The account of historical debates on Chechnya and Russia starts by reviewing classical Russian literary representations in the nineteenth century. I then sketch the representations that dominated official discourse in the Soviet period as well as those that accompanied the First post-Soviet Chechen War, official as well as media representations. Finally, representations found in texts of the nationalist and communist opposition prior to 1999 are presented. The account draws largely on secondary literature. Several scholars have already investigated articulations and re-articulations of Chechnya as one of Russia’s habitual Others. The sum of these articulations is taken as a sounding-board for the official securitization of the Chechen threat in 1999. Throughout this chapter, the official narrative extracted and presented in Chapter 5 will be compared to dominant representations of the relation between Chechnya and Russia found in key texts pre-dating 1999.
