Securitization

“Chat control” may be off the table. The reflex behind it is not.

The Danish “chat control” proposal, put forth under the rotating EU Presidency has cooled. Not because Brussels woke up allergic to surveillance, but because the blunt version was politically toxic. Proposals tied to blanket scanning of private communications hit resistance, and the language shifted toward “voluntary,” “risk-based,” and “targeted” capability.

The Danes do not only have bad ideas like chat control, biking drunk, and doing 10 shots of snaps at a Christmas lunch. They also have good ones.

One example is securitization, developed by the Copenhagen School, (most notably Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver), treats “security” less as an objective condition and more as a political construction.

The move is rather simple.

Powerful actors identify a phenomenon as an existential threat and, in doing so, legitimize extraordinary measures that would not survive normal legal and democratic scrutiny.

In that sense, securitization challenges the comforting notion that security policy is merely a technical response to facts “out there.” It shows how the category of security is often manufactured, then used as a shortcut around procedures, debate, and proportionality.

Wæver’s contribution is to frame security as a speech act, although the concept of “speech act” can be traced back to John Langshaw Austin’s argument that language is not merely descriptive, but also performative. Speech does not only describe the world but can also change it.

Austin provided the examples of saying “I do” in a wedding ceremony or naming a ship, both of which are speech acts, that perform an action that immediately impacts and changes your world.

Likewise, calling something a security threat can change what becomes politically permissible. The words do not just describe the world. They help reorganize it.

In Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde insist on keeping “security” tied to “survival “and “life and death” stakes, but they shift attention to how issues become treated that way.

They also widen the terrain beyond the military into five sectors. Military, political, economic, societal, and environmental. The point is not that everything is security. The point is to track the moments when something gets framed as security, and what that framing enables.

A securitization has a few moving parts:

- A securitizing actor (typically a government or elite figure)

- A referent object (what is said to be threatened: sovereignty, identity, the economy, public order)

- A claim of existential urgency

- A push for emergency measures

- And crucially, audience acceptance.

If the public, parliament, courts, or other elites do not buy it, the move fails.

If they do, the exceptional becomes normal.

This is also where the risks show up.

Once “security” is invoked, the political logic shifts from trade-offs to necessity. From rules to exceptions. And the security dilemma sits in the background: one actor’s attempt to “increase safety” can force others into precautionary escalation, leaving everyone worse off. Even in democracies, securitization tends to centralize authority, compress dissent, and expand state discretion. Not always. Often enough to matter.

So when “chat control” gets repackaged from mandatory scanning to “capability” and “voluntary detection”, it is not merely a policy tweak - or “newspeak”, another classic term from Mr. Orwell’s 1984. It is a familiar securitizing pattern. Keep the infrastructure, soften the rhetoric, and preserve the option to go further later.

If you want a tragicomic footnote on securitization’s flexibility, Greenland is the cleanest prop imaginable. Why did Trump need Greenland? National Security…

Take a frozen (although less in recent times), sparsely populated island that already hosts a US military presence, where Washington already has wide latitude to expand if it chooses, sits on Arctic sea lanes, and happens to be rich in minerals. Then say the magic words: “national security.”

Suddenly, what would normally be a diplomatic non-starter gets recast as an “existential necessity,” and the policy conversation shifts from should we to how could we, and from law to capability.

That is securitization in one move. It does not prove the threat. It upgrades the tone. It grants the speaker permission to treat politics like an emergency exit.

And the punchline is the portability. If Greenland can be narrated as “security,” then so can encryption, libraries, welfare systems, migration, strikes, universities, and whatever else is inconvenient in a given quarter. The referent object changes. The logic stays the same. Name it survival, and you get to skip the normal queue.

Sources

Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap De Wilde (1998)

Orwell: 1984