What's the Deal with Elites? The Role of Political Elites in Identifying Critical Situations in Ontological Security Theory

Abstract Traditionally, Ontological Security Studies (OSS) have focused on the anxieties and crises of unitary states. More recent scholarship, however, has begun prioritizing the micro-level by exploring the ontological insecurities of individuals. Yet which actors are more important for identifying crises in the first place, and how do they do it? This article argues that we need to pay attention to the intermediary level of analysis between state and individual — to elites. It does so by contributing to OSS’s ongoing problematization of the level of analysis by exploring how elites identify crises and experience ontological (in)security. It is argued that the insecurities of domestic elites, and the origins of these insecurities, help us understand the emergence of critical situations in OSS. The paper then proposes two processes of elite crisis identification that prioritize how elites monitor the occurrence of critical situations. How they do so depends on whether elites derive their ontological (in)security from the state’s autobiographical narrative (referred to as statist reflexivity) or from other actors (parochial reflexivity). To illustrate this theoretical contribution, the paper applies statist reflexivity to a case vignette, the concerns of British Eurosceptics about continued European integration in the early 2010s. Eurosceptics regarded integration as incompatible with their interpretation of the country’s island identity, which required separateness from the European continent’s political project. Analyzing the struggle within the British Conservative Party about Britain’s relationship to continental Europe that began in the 1970s and culminated in the early 2010s, the paper elucidates how paying attention to elite dynamics can help us understand the emergence of ontological crises.