Ontological Security

Ontological security - a state’s security in its own identity achieved through a search for a stable inter-state context - is an IR concept that explains how the ROC mobilises huadu in response to perceived Chinese threat.545 Jennifer Mitzen (2006)

argues that state identity and foreign policy are co-constituted.546 All states seek

territorial security and all realist scholars agree uncertainty causes conflict in state interactions.547 The extent to which there is an ideational security dilemma across the

Taiwan Strait rests on each side’s perceptions of the other’s intentions and the extent to which China and Taiwan are status quo or revisionist powers.548 An ideal-type

model would see China, as a greedy state, creating cross-Strait ideational dilemmas and insecurity through tongyi discourses while Taiwan, as a security seeker, creates ideational uncertainty through taidu discourses, causing China to react with threats. However, this is to underplay the potential for state identity change. Taipei,

545 _{See: Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern}

Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press

546 _{Mitzen, Jennifer. 2006. Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security}

Dilemma. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3): 341-70. The sociological concept was developed by Giddens and refers to the need for ‘the reduction of uncertainties about the vagaries of nature and the reduction of uncertainties in respect to future events’. See: Giddens, Anthony. 1986. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press: 271.

547 _{Schweller, Randall. 1996: 119-120; Mitzen, Jennifer. 2006: 341.}

perceiving a Chinese threat, seeks to reassure Beijing by using huadu to maintain the status quo, thus securing its own autonomy and stalemating China’s power.

States become ontologically insecure when perceived threats disrupt the status quo, raising fundamental questions about state identity.549 Taiwan’s security requires a

secure state identity and ontological insecurity represents a threat to its identity.550

Agency for Taiwan requires a stable status quo in which Beijing and Taipei establish routines that create certainty. Huadu, therefore, creates ontological security on both sides, since it creates predictable routines. In this context, post-2008 Rapprochement was a concerted attempt to routinise the language of cross-Strait conflict by framing it diplomatically and rhetorically at the surface level. Taipei cannot sustain huadu without Beijing reciprocating; the Other’s recognition allows the Self to retain its type.551 This suggests that huadu provides ontological security for both China and

Taiwan by maintaining the status quo and averting taidu. Cross-Strait relations constitute a routinisation of conflict that actually avoids uncertainty as to China’s and Taiwan’s identities. Because of loss of legitimacy and Chinese threat, the ROC cannot securitise a Chinese identity. For this reason, it reconstructed its identity and sought certainty in what appears to be an uncertain huadu state identity to maintain the status quo. This creates a paradox.

Since it is not uncertainty but certainty that provokes cross-Strait threat perception,

huadu actually creates certainty in routinisation. Thus, Taipei may in the long run

be creating uncertainty for Beijing since huadu entails a Taiwanese ROC state identity and, consequently, political divergence. Therefore, the increasing ontological certainty entailed in huadu may actually deepen the security dilemma. Material

549 _{Mitzen, Jennifer. 2006.} 550 _{Mitzen, Jennifer.2006. 342.} 551 _{Wendt, Alexander. 1999: 77-88.}

security for Beijing means neutralising Taiwan as a neorealist threat. Ontological security for Beijing means Taiwan must be Chinese. For this, huadu must entail eventual tongyi; yet the discourse shows that it is code for taidu. So, by deploying

huadu, Taiwan threatens China’s ontological security. “No realist argument fully

captures the identity effects of persistent conflict because none acknowledges the social construction of state identity”.552 Huadu, as a form of ontological security

seeking, gives a structural explanation for irrational conflicts, inviting a RC conception. The paradox exists in the gap between semantic and pragmatic meaning in illocution and perlocution (q.v. 5.3; 5.3.7.).

4.7. Conclusion

This chapter has argued that huadu is a state identity that draws on and deploys discursive power to bestow legitimacy on the ROC as Taiwan. As such, it constitutes Taiwan’s de facto independence. The literature on Taiwan’s national identity cannot fully account for huadu because it conflates state, national and ethnic identities and misunderstands Taiwan Independence. This gap prompts this study’s state-identity framework. Five observations are salient. First, NI modernism suggests that the ROC created the Taiwanese nation and that the latter identifies with the ROC. Second,

huadu is a state identity that achieves legitimacy through its de facto authority to

govern and in Taiwanese norms. Thus, it achieves the sanction of a broad legitimacy nexus that includes the international community and Beijing. Third, modernist NI, Weberian and Durkheimian approaches, Wendtian constructivism and Alexandrov’s IR model together provide a RC framework that accounts for huadu’s construction in ROC crises of legitimacy, cross-Strait relations and domestic politics through SIPs. Such SIPs are linguistically enacted in power politics as discursive power. Fourth, an

RC framework shows how huadu resolves the ROC-Taiwan cleavage and the two- host dilemma. In doing so, it defines Taiwan’s preferences and normative representations in a Lockean culture of anarchy, providing a more expansive explanation than Wendt’s alone. Fifth, the 1992 Consensus provides the permissive cross-Strait encoding of huadu as state identity, achieving Beijing’s buy-in because it semantically averts taidu. This potentially provides ontological security on both sides because routinisation creates certainty. Yet, paradoxically, such certainty creates ontological insecurity for Beijing because read pragmatically huadu is tacit taidu.

Huadu maintains Taiwan’s de facto independence through the status quo and resists

China’s power. It is co-constitutive of state sovereignty and determines what constitutes security and the national interest. Thus, state identity construction always occurs in the context of power politics. Discursive power creates state identity as legitimacy and uses it to bolster its own position.

In short, Taiwan is an example of a general phenomenon; the co-constitutive dynamics of power, interests, threat perception and identity determine whether and how states emerge as independent and sovereign.Most importantly, huadu as state identity is inert unless catalysed through power politics (SIPs), interest and threat perception in cross-Strait policy.

Huadu constitutes prevailing discourses concerning the Taiwanese (ROC) state’s

relationship to China (and the Taiwanese nation). These discourses are socially constructed in power politics internally and externally in preference to tongyi and

taidu and represent discursive power - that is, legitimation. They deploy traditional

ROC symbols such as the flag and names and more recent Taiwanese attributes such as democracy to create a Taiwanised synthesis. As such, huadu prevails over tongyi

and taidu and secures Taiwan’s sovereignty, stalemating China’s power in the process.